Tag Archive for: Malcolm Turnbull

The evolution of Australia’s China challenge

Cascading wake-up moments have shaken Australia’s view of China over the past five years.

The realisations—a succession of gee-whizz, crikey and oops events—have pushed Canberra to new places.

The impact doesn’t amount to shock; this is China, after all. But it has caused shifts. And shifts have cumulative effects.

Shakes shove at policy and politicians. Moods and modes move, overturning the bureaucratic evolution of policy as predictable layering on the existing base.

Crikey moments have taken the comfort out of China policy. The incremental approach suffers gee-whizz gyrations. We’ve just had four weeks of wobbles.

Australia’s call for an international inquiry on the origins and development of the Covid-19 pandemic got a blast from Beijing. China’s ambassador to Canberra accused Australia of joining the US in ‘resorting to suspicion, recrimination or division’.

Beijing hit the economic coercion button, targeting Oz beef and barley.

As part of a ‘robust program’ in the South China Sea, HMAS Parramatta conducted exercises with three US Navy ships. Or, as Euan Graham put it, Australia joined the cavalry to push back at ‘cynically timed Chinese adventurism in the South China Sea, offering reassurance to wavering Southeast Asian countries’.

To see the five-year curve, consult Malcolm Turnbull. The China chapter of his memoir, A bigger picture, is a wake-up compilation. The former prime minister records his question to China’s Premier Li Keqiang: ‘Surely China should want to be seen as more of a cuddly panda than a scary dragon?’

Turnbull relates his shifting answer, starting with the geopolitical impact of China’s island-building land grab in the South China Sea. He dishes domestic detail on cyber espionage, Chinese investment and political interference, and banning Chinese 5G technology.

Dragonish behaviour caused Australia’s China reset.

On the crikey of cyber assault:

[W]hat’s become increasingly apparent over the last decade is the industrial scale, scope and effectiveness of Chinese intelligence gathering and in particular cyberespionage. They do more of it than anyone else, by far, and apply more resources to it than anyone else. They target commercial secrets, especially in technology, even where they have no connection with national security. And, finally, they’re very good at it. A last point, which speaks to the growing confidence of China, is that they’re not embarrassed by being caught.

Beijing got heartburn at Canberra’s refusal to join the Belt and Road Initiative. Australia would be happy to work on specific projects, ‘but we would not sign up to a slogan when we had no control over its content or substance’.

On the oops of espionage and foreign interference, ‘Australian governments had simply not been paying attention’, Turnbull writes.

Our espionage laws were out of date, last revised during the Cold War, and we had no legislation to regulate, let alone prohibit, foreign political donations. With so much foreign, mostly Chinese, money flowing in and around politics, we also lacked any transparency legislation.

Turnbull introduced legislation on foreign interference and foreign influence in December 2017, stating the Chinese Communist Party worked covertly to interfere with the Australian parliament, media and universities. China denounced the law; Turnbull pushed back, using a defiant line drawn from Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory statement: ‘The Australian people stand up.’

Rendering it in Mandarin made the point even sharper, enraging Mandarin speakers from Beijing to Kevin Rudd.

Turnbull recalls the ‘slightly discordant note’ when US President Barack Obama complained in 2015 about the Port of Darwin being leased to a Chinese company. With the US rotating marines through Darwin, Turnbull concedes, ‘it wasn’t a good look’. Communications had ‘gone amiss’ and the US government first heard about the deal from the Wall Street Journal. Turnbull reruns his jest line: ‘I did offer to buy the White House a subscription to the Northern Territory News.’

The jests evaporate when he gets to ‘a far more serious snafu’ that arose over New South Wales’ effort—nearly a done deal—to sell almost all of its electricity assets to China. ‘There had clearly been a breakdown in communications within our national security agencies.’

The wake-up response was to create a centre to check on the national security risks of foreign acquisitions of critical infrastructure. The mood shift is such that during the Covid-19 crisis, the government has cut to $0 the threshold for checks by the Foreign Investment Review Board. No vital assets will be sold cheap during the pandemic. And, you could deduce, there’s no way Darwin’s port would be sold today.

In the week the Liberal Party toppled Turnbull as PM, Australia became the first nation to ban ‘high risk’ vendors (read: China’s Huawei and ZTE) from building its 5G network. Unlike 4G and 3G, he notes, 5G can’t be divided into core and non-core elements: ‘[T]he core is no more—the intelligence it used to contain will be distributed throughout the network.’

The 5G risk arrived, Turnbull writes, because of ‘ferocious competition from the Chinese vendors on price and an absence of mind’ in the Five Eyes intelligence club (the US, Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand).

An adversary with a permanent beachhead in an economy’s most important enabling platform technology would have the ability to make all or parts of the network—or devices and institutions within it—unavailable or unresponsive.

After intensive investigation and discussions with other Five Eyes countries, ‘the unequivocal advice was that the risks couldn’t be mitigated’. Huawei isn’t a smoking gun, Turnbull says, but a loaded gun.

The wake-up words mount: absence of mind, lack of attention, no control, snafu.

With two grandchildren of Chinese heritage, Turnbull ends by dismissing ‘the false premise that any criticism of or concern about China and its ruling Communist Party is “anti-Chinese” or racist’.

Australia has shifted because its major economic partner has form as a bully and reveals its potential as an adversary.

Turnbull memoir lays out Australia’s shift on China

Australia must both hug the panda and slay the dragon. Simultaneously.

A quarter of Australia’s international trade and well over a third of our exports go to a nation that might assault a Royal Australian Navy ship in the South China Sea. That ship fear shaped Malcolm Turnbull’s shift on China while he was prime minister.

The trade boom benefit confronts the danger of security bang.

Turnbull, Australia’s 29th prime minister, once got the China relationship in one word: ‘frenemy’.

Turnbull’s predecessor, Tony Abbott, needed only three words for what drives our China policy: ‘fear and greed’.

Two Liberal prime ministers, who could agree on little else, concur on the challenge that is China.

While not reusing the ‘frenemy’ word, Turnbull’s memoir, A bigger picture, devotes a chapter to China and that balance between friend and enemy. And how to deal with Beijing when it’s being a bully. That word ‘bully’ runs through the account.

Turnbull’s discussion of China’s island-building land grab in the South China Sea—‘to create facts on the ground, or above the water’—illustrates the tests and tensions.

Turnbull says he repeatedly told Chinese leaders that their strategy was counterproductive: ‘Was the tenuous advantage given by establishing these forward operating bases worth the tensions that it was creating?’

Australia doesn’t recognise the legitimacy of what China has built. But unlike the US Navy, the Royal Australian Navy doesn’t sail ships inside 12 nautical miles (the limit of territorial waters) of the new islands. Australia stays outside that zone to avoid a confrontation that ‘would easily play into China’s hands’, Turnbull writes.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy knows that if it conflicts with a US ship, it runs the risk of rapid escalation into full-blown conflict. But an Australian ship is a different proposition altogether. If one of our ships were to be rammed and disabled within the 12-mile limit by a Chinese vessel, we don’t have the capacity to escalate. If the Americans backed us in, then the Chinese would back off. But if Washington hesitated or, for whatever reasons, decided not to or was unable immediately to intervene, then China would have achieved an enormous propaganda win, exposing the USA as a paper tiger not to be relied on by its allies. My judgement was that given the volatile geopolitical climate at the time, especially between the USA and China, it wasn’t a risk worth taking.

The possibility of what China might do becomes a question of what the US would do. Australia does the panda–dragon balance while keeping a constant eye on Uncle Sam.

Turnbull hates being called a panda hugger. Yet his China chapter describes a hugger who slowly picked up the sword.

Start that journey from a speech Turnbull gave in 2011 at the London School of Economics which rejected any thought that ‘China’s economic growth meant it was inevitably going to become a military threat’. The strategic response, he said, ‘should be to hedge against adverse and unlikely future contingencies as opposed to seeking to contain (futilely in all likelihood) a rising power’.

The 2011 speech had elements that ran through all of Turnbull’s later foreign policy thinking:

  • China would become the world’s largest economy and, in time, a military equal of the US.
  • China’s institutions and culture are very different to Australia’s, yet China is ‘in large measure responsible for our current and prospective prosperity’.
  • Australia wants good relations with both the US and China but must deal with a multipolar world by drawing closer to other countries in Asia, ‘as we deepen our relations and trust with our neighbours’.

Zip forward six years to June 2017, when Turnbull saw ‘the gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability’ and warned that Asia couldn’t rely on China or the US ‘to safeguard our interests’. This was Turnbull’s keynote address to the Shangri-La Dialogue in June 2017.

At the time, I called it a Hunger Games vision and now rank the Singapore oration as the defining foreign policy speech of Turnbull’s prime ministership: toughen up to Beijing, tip-toe around Trump.

Turnbull’s Shangri-La hope was for a free and open neighbourhood, but the details had turned devilish. The region we wanted to help shape wasn’t emerging in the shape that we wanted.

The language about Beijing had become robust. In Turnbull’s words, it was a ‘dark view’ of a ‘coercive China’ seeking domination.

Turnbull’s memoir describes the atmosphere shaping the speech. Amid ‘a blizzard of often hysterical and frenzied commentary on the China relationship’, Canberra was working out how to cope with the ‘bullying tactics’ of a Beijing seeking ‘to supplant the United States as the leading power in the region’.

Criticising China meant consequences: ‘Ministerial visits would be stopped or curtailed, trade deals would be frozen or not followed through, Chinese tourism would drop off, foreign businesses in China would be boycotted.’

Charting what happened between those two speeches, Turnbull cites a maxim of defence strategy—capability changes over decades, but intent can change in a heartbeat:

In the six years between my speech at the LSE in 2011 and my Shangri-La address in 2017, China’s capabilities, in every respect, had continued to grow; but what had really changed was its intent. Under Xi, it became more assertive, more confident and more prepared to not just reach out to the world, as Deng [Xiaoping] had done, or to command respect as a responsible international actor, as Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin had done, but to demand compliance.

Many elements combined to create the current icy age between Canberra and Beijing; but if I had to select a public start date (as opposed to all the behind-the-scenes argy-bargy), I’d nominate that Shangri-La speech in June 2017. With that as the starting point, the fifth Oz–China icy age is entering its fourth year.

An end to Australia’s democratic pantomime?

What explains Australia’s bizarre leadership churn? No prime minister has served a full term since 2007, with five different faces becoming prime minister in the last five years: Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull—and now, in the latest party-room coup, Scott Morrison, whom most Australians, let alone international observers, would struggle to identify in a line-up. All this is happening in a long-established, conflict-free, and above all prosperous parliamentary democracy, enjoying a record 27th year of uninterrupted economic growth.

The answer still seems to lie in the three factors—globally familiar, nationally systemic and personally idiosyncratic—that I identified three years ago. Is this entertainment—no joke here, however many others abroad may be laughing—destined to continue indefinitely, or can the cycle be broken?

The first explanation of the churn is that Australia is not immune to the preoccupation with personalities and popularity polls, and the demand for instant gratification rather than serious policy debate, afflicting most of the world’s established democracies in this age of the 24/7 media cycle and omnipresent social media. Traditional mainstream political parties everywhere, spooked by populist fringe-dwellers, are constantly on edge trying to work out how to counter their appeal.

A second dimension is Australia-specific: the tension created by peculiarities in our Westminster parliamentary system. A ludicrously short three-year electoral cycle, briefer than almost anywhere else in the world, makes it almost impossible to govern in a campaign-free atmosphere. The Senate, with more formal power to block and bring down governments than any comparable upper house, has been dominated in recent years by a litter of minor parties and independents reminiscent of the bar scene from Star Wars. These oddballs have made it very difficult for any prime minister to deliver on the promises he or she makes.

Moreover, the internal rules of the major parties—the now governing Liberal–National coalition, and until recently Labor—have permitted leaders, including serving prime ministers, to be torn down overnight by their own colleagues, with no referral to the wider party membership or other delaying process. If a leader is seen to be losing appeal, either to the broader electorate (or, as happened with Malcolm Turnbull last week, the party’s own base), the absence of any braking mechanism to force reflection means that momentum for change can build and feed on itself with sometimes lunatic rapidity.

The remaining part of the explanation is undoubtedly local and personal: the character quirks that have contributed to each leader’s dramatic rise and equally spectacular fall. Gillard was a highly competent transactional politician who had her minute of international fame with a brilliantly passionate attack on her opponent’s misogyny. But she was seen as politically tone-deaf otherwise.

Rudd, who wrested the leadership back from her in 2013, remains intellectually without peer and highly regarded internationally, but was seen by his colleagues, not entirely unfairly, as too often incommunicative, obsessive and having misplaced policy priorities.

Abbott, profoundly conservative and hyper-partisan, proved utterly incapable of managing the transition from opposition to government. He presided over the cabinet with slogans rather than coherent policy, and constantly alienated his colleagues with unpopular ‘captain’s picks’.

Turnbull, the urbane but arrogant former journalist, lawyer and investment banker, whose deposition of Abbott in 2015 triggered a crusade of sustained internal hatred which finally drove his own ouster last week, was initially popular—and apparently as liberal in his instincts as Abbott was reactionary. But, while he maintained more public support than any of his internal rivals, he proved unable to translate it into opinion-poll majorities. And as he made ever more concessions to his party’s right wing in order to survive—notably on climate policy—the perception took root that he had no core beliefs at all, other than in his own genius.

Morrison is a potentially more appealing knockabout character, and less divisive than Turnbull’s main conservative challenger, the Abbott acolyte Peter Dutton, would have been. But bridging the gulf between the Liberal Party’s moderate and reactionary wings will probably be beyond him, with his public salesmanship not helped by the announced departure from politics of the well-known and well-regarded former deputy leader and foreign minister, Julie Bishop, who was the party’s most senior woman.

Moreover, Morrison’s very conservative social stance and hyper-liberal economic positions make him vulnerable to Labor electoral attack. For example, Morrison has opposed same-sex marriage, a phase-out of reliance on coal, and royal commission scrutiny of the big banks, and has supported big corporate tax cuts and a major dilution of Australia’s traditionally progressive income tax.

With the public manifestly fed up with division and dysfunction in the governing coalition parties, Australia’s next election, most likely in May 2019, seems now almost certain to result in yet another new prime minister, Labor’s Bill Shorten. Impossible though it may be to confidently predict anything about Australia’s future, given the madness of recent years, there are reasonable grounds for believing that this could be a circuit breaker, and that we might at last have leadership for the long haul.

The first reason for such confidence is that Labor has introduced a rule (which could be circumvented only in the most exceptional circumstances) that any leadership change between elections requires supermajorities in the parliamentary caucus and endorsement by the wider party membership. That change has already delivered leadership continuity and stability for the last five years, and there is no mood to go back.

The other reason is that Labor’s current front bench is not riven by any significant personal or ideological divisions, and seems to have an overall depth and breadth of competence not seen since the successful Bob Hawke and Paul Keating governments of the 1980s and 1990s. As party leader, Shorten continues to generate mixed reviews, not least because of the difficulty he sometimes seems to have in suppressing his instincts as a former trade-union apparatchik. But he is an astute strategist, has a good policy brain and decent core values, and is an excellent communicator one-on-one and in small groups (if less compelling in other settings).

Shorten and his team seem, overall, to be mercifully free of the indiscipline and character quirks and flaws that have afflicted Australia’s national leadership over the last decade. In the interests of our credibility abroad and sanity at home, it is not just Labor Party loyalists here who are fervently hoping so.

The Indo-Pacific: what kind of peace?

Image courtesy of Flickr user James Lee.

Prime Minister Turnbull’s keynote address to the recent Shangri-La Dialogue turned upon one critical question: what kind of peace does Australia hope to see in the 21st century Indo-Pacific? That’s not a small question. Turnbull’s answer—born, he noted, ‘from ambition not anxiety’—made the case for an enduring, liberal, rules-based regional order. That’s Australian strategic policy in its upbeat mode. In that mode, Australia has a grand strategic ‘vision’; it’s an order-builder; and an optimist. The keynote was an invitation to other regional states to join Australia on a quest for closer cooperation and a renewal of the regional order-building project.

The difficulty, of course, as Turnbull’s address readily acknowledges, is that a successful, rules-based liberal order requires ‘the disciplining of power’. ‘This is a world where big fish neither eat nor intimidate the small’. That was easier to do when the dominant power was the US, because the whole concept of the disciplining of power is central to American political culture. But in a region awash with power transition, sustaining that discipline is about to become considerably more difficult. Rising powers, such as China and India, seek greater strategic influence—‘a return to the natural order of things’, as Turnbull puts it. For such powers, the temptation runs more towards the flexing of newly-built muscles than towards discipline and restraint. Still, Turnbull has to argue the case. Continuing power discipline is more than just sound logic; it’s the long pole in the tent of regional stability as multipolarity emerges and unipolarity wanes.

The prime minister’s address is somewhat thinner on what regional security might look like without that discipline—or even on the extent to which discipline is itself a product of power-balancing—although he does allude to the option that regional states might ally and partner more fully with each other as well as with the US. True, they might. But the spoke-to-spoke relationships that have emerged in Asia over recent years provide only weak testimony to the speed and ease with which such deeply important strategic cooperation might develop. So far, at least, spoke-to-spoke cooperation has been marked by rhetorical boldness but strategic trivialism.

So, to whom is Turnbull’s message about discipline directed? The obvious—but incomplete—answer is ‘China’. China’s depicted as the country most needing to build a ‘reservoir of trust and cooperation’ with its neighbours. Curbing North Korea’s recklessness is even spelt out as an immediate contribution that China could make to enhance regional security. And Turnbull implicitly suggests that, until it builds that reservoir, it won’t be seen as a regional leader because ‘the burden of collective leadership’ is best shared with ‘trusted partners and friends’. At various points in the speech, too, there are specific phrases—such as the importance of unchallenged freedom of navigation in Australia’s vision of the ideal world—which seem clearly directed at Beijing.

But Turnbull’s main theme is actually about the arrival of a multipolar Asia. Other power centres in Asia are also identified, specifically, Japan, India and Indonesia. A sensible reading of Turnbull’s keynote would suggest that the point about the disciplining of power also applies to them. So the speech can be seen as a reminder—sotto voce—to Tokyo that Japan’s re-emergence as a strategic power will be watched closely by regional countries. Similarly, it sounds a note of caution to New Delhi, that—beyond its immediate neighbourhood—India’s role as a regional leader is largely untested. And it underlines a concern—albeit one with deep resonances in Canberra—over the future trajectory of a more powerful Indonesia.

In Australia’s most optimistic vision, all the emerging Asian great powers find within themselves the capacity for disciplined leadership. That’s possible, of course. But Asian culture is typically hierarchical, not egalitarian. None of those powers enjoys a domestic political culture which takes it as a self-evident truth ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

Any way we slice it, the regional strategic environment’s becoming more complex. Alongside the emergence of a multipolar Asia, ASEAN—‘the region’s strategic convenor’—faces its own challenges. The growth of power in the immediate vicinity of the organisation’s Southeast Asian hub seems likely to test even the current levels of inclusiveness and integration between the ten members, let alone ASEAN’s capacity to take on a bigger agenda. So the prime minister’s putting his shoulder to the wheel of a ‘strong, unified ASEAN’, which supports and maintains the rule of law, and champions liberal economic values, sets the organisation a daunting task.

Anyone reading between the lines of Turnbull’s address must come away from it with a greater sense of the enormity of the task that now lies before the region. Can we sustain the liberal, rules-based order in Asia? Every hegemon aspires to create a regime which outlives its own influence, and in principle that aspiration is achievable—if new inputs to the existing order can be found at a rate which exceeds the hegemon’s loss of relative power and influence. America’s inheritance of the Western ‘project’ from Britain provides proof of concept. But it will be a neat trick if we can pull that off in Asia.

Finding the positives to fix the US alliance

Image courtesy of Pixabay user Alexas_Fotos.

It takes two people to make a phone call, but when it’s between Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull, the call doesn’t happen by accident.

Usually when world leaders speak together, it’s only after advisers and bureaucrats have worked hard to agree on an agenda and have a pretty clear idea about what the call aims to achieve. All the more amazing then that the Trump–Turnbull call last week was such a complete debacle. Whatever the final deal on accepting people in detention on Nauru and PNG, neither leader emerged stronger from the bruising encounter.

The phone call could have been designed to play up the great strengths in Australia–US relations: our intelligence cooperation, deep defence engagement, strong investment, trade and people-to-people ties. So how was it that one of the few sore points between Australia and the US was the only topic?

Australian leaders always spend more time worrying about our interests in Washington than the other way around. That’s hardly surprising: the US is a global superpower. In any year the President may have only three or four lengthy conversations with the Australian PM. The upside for Australia is that—if we’re smart about it—we get opportunities to shape our alliance with the Americans. We have more riding on the outcome and invest more in understanding the art of the possible in Washington.

It just doesn’t look like we’ve been putting in that kind of effort with the US recently. Canberra wasn’t plugged into the Trump team in the lead-up to the election. We needed Greg Norman’s help to get Trump’s phone number after the vote. And unlike Japanese Prime Minister Abe and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, it didn’t seem to be a priority for Turnbull to get together with Trump before his inauguration.

The Turnbull government wistfully but loudly hoped Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership would somehow be revived even as Trump signed the Executive Order killing it. And when General James Mattis, made his first visit to Asia early this week as US Defense Secretary, he went to Japan and South Korea but not Australia. What the…? Japan and Korea aren’t flying strike aircraft bombing IS fighters. Their soldiers aren’t doing training in Iraq. The Australian Defence Force is. But not a squeak of protest came from Canberra about Mattis’ no-show.

Go back to 2015 and it was Australia that neglected to tell the US that the Port of Darwin had been leased to a Chinese company for 99 years, including the wharf used by the US Marines when they train in northern Australia. That happened at the same time as ministers were meeting in Boston for the 2015 AUSMIN talks with Julie Bishop and Marise Payne alongside John Kerry and Ash Carter. The US folk heard about the Port of Darwin deal on their flight back to Washington. Surprise surprise, AUSMIN 2016 was cancelled.

Everything points to the reality that Australia has been getting too relaxed and comfortable about our US alliance relationship. Too willing to believe our own over-blown language about how great the alliance is and to let things drift. But even the closest alliance buys no tolerance in Washington when really tough political issues are at stake.

Turnbull should never have been put in the position of needing to make the focus of his first phone call with President Trump about honouring Obama’s pledge to take the PNG and Nauru detainees. The fact that Trump appears willing to honour Obama’s promise, even though it’s through gritted teeth, is testament to the strength of our alliance with the US. But he’ll expect a favour or two in return.

There’s even less credit on the American side of the phone call. Trump’s inability to keep a phone call confidential for even a few hours before tweeting and then blurting a distorted version of it to a public lunch gathering is ludicrously amateurish. The President’s bullying language and his inability to remember even basic details of the issue aren’t marks of a person able to do the world’s most important job.

It’s also no way to treat a close ally. If Trump keeps his attitude up, around the world the US will end up with sullen partners but few close friends—and it’s the friends in international relations that you can rely on.

Then we had the performance of the White House staff. Media spokesman Sean Spicer repeatedly referred to Mr Turnbull as ‘Mr Trumble’ and Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the President, implied that Australians had leaked the conversation. As if we’d leak that embarrassing tongue lashing from Trump! The White House team have looked like hapless Keystone cops over the last two weeks. For the sake of world stability they need to get a lot better, and fast!

Malcolm Turnbull should head to Washington quickly. Trump deals better with people in face-to-face meetings. A fresh start between the two leaders should focus on the many positives in the alliance relationship. But on top of history, Turnbull will need some new ideas to offer by way of closer cooperation and security burden sharing in Asia and the Middle East.

Planning to do more together in the alliance will bring the relationship back to a more normal, positive focus.

Cyber wrap

Image courtesy of Flickr user ironsjp.

Welcome back to the first Cyber wrap of 2017! Since our last post in mid-December, the political fallout from Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US election continue to reverberate. On 29 December President Obama ejected 35 Russian diplomats from the US, imposed sanctions on Russian intelligence agencies and organisations suspected of involvement in the hacks, and blocked Russian access to two Russian government properties in the US. On the same day the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security released technical details of malicious Russian cyber activity, which they dubbed ‘Grizzly Steppe’.

On 5 January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA chief Admiral Mike Rogers offered some thoughts on the issue before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Following the testimony, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified and released its report on Russian cyber actions related to the election, drawing on CIA, FBI and NSA intelligence.

The report concluded that the agencies had ‘high confidence’ that Vladimir Putin had directed Russian intelligence agencies to undertake an influence campaign during the 2016 election. Interestingly the report reveals some difference of opinion within the US intelligence community. The CIA and FBI have high confidence that the Russian campaign was designed to help Trump, whereas the NSA only had ‘moderate confidence’ that this was the case. On the same day the report was released, Homeland Security added election infrastructure to its list of US critical infrastructure subsectors.

Donald Trump was initially  dismissive of the allegations made about the election and sceptical of US intelligence analysis on the issue. Since receiving classified briefings he has toned down some of that scepticism, noting that Russia is one of many countries targeting the US, but he has refused to acknowledge it may have had a role in his election win.

Now that he’s in the White House, President Trump has also ordered a series of 60 day cybersecurity reviews according to a leaked draft executive order. Those will include reviews of US cyber vulnerabilities, co-chaired by the secretaries for Defense and Homeland Security, a cyber adversaries’ review, co-chaired by the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Homeland Security, and a cyber capability review also co-chaired by Defense and Homeland Security. However the new President continues to cause headaches for cyber security personnel in the White House, allegedly choosing to hold onto an outdated Samsung Galaxy S3 or S4.

Russia’s efforts during the US election have had an impact in Australia as well. Prompted by the ODNI report, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Assistant Minister for Cyber Security have arranged for Australian political party leaders to be briefed by Cyber Security Special Adviser Alastair MacGibbon and staff from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) on the potential dangers posed by foreign interference in elections, and how to mitigate them.

The Australian government also announced in January that it plans to establish a new Critical Infrastructure Centre within the Attorney-General’s Department. The Centre will include staff from ASIO, ASD, and Treasury  who will focus on security risk assessments of power, ports and water utilities, covering both physical infrastructure and cyber security. The Centre will also maintain a register of critical assets which have the potential to trigger ‘national security scrutiny’ during foreign investment reviews, addressing concerns about inconsistency in 2016’s FIRB processes. The new Centre will work closely with state and territory governments as well as the private sector to comprehensively assess Australian critical infrastructure, a task that may be easier with the establishment of Chief Information Security Officer positions in the NSW and Tasmanian governments.

And briefly in news this week, reports that hotel guests in Austria were locked in or out of their rooms after hackers targeted the electronic room key system at a hotel in Austria were dismissed by the hotel owners. While they admitted their computer system was affected by ransomware, they were able to manually lock and unlock guest rooms. Ransomware also infected 70% of police security cameras in Washington DC  a few days before the inauguration of President Trump. The malware meant the cameras were unable to record for three days in January, forcing authorities to take the system offline to remediate the infection. And finally sad news from Tokyo, with the passing of Masaya Nakamura, who founded video and arcade game giant Namco in 1955, and oversaw the creation of Pac-Man in 1980.

Cyber wrap

Image courtesy of Flickr user Blue Coat Photos.

The consequences of August’s #censusfail continue to reverberate in Canberra, and two reports released last week—one by the PM’s Special Adviser on Cyber Security, Alastair MacGibbon; the other by the Senate’s Economics Committee—pull no punches. Both reports are highly critical of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and IBM for the planning, management and response to the census debacle. MacGibbon’s report noted that the ABS had no ‘clearly identified and tested cyber security incident response processes’, resulting in ad-hoc decision-making, and that the government’s Cyber Incident Management Arrangements were similarly inadequate.

MacGibbon’s report also recommends that a ‘Cyber Bootcamp’ for senior government executives and Ministers should be instituted to educate them on cyber risks and crisis communications. IBM was called out for its failure to plan for and test its response to foreseeable incidents such as a DDoS, and both reports criticised the single-source tender approach by the ABS to the procurement of IBM’s services. The government has reached a settlement with IBM for an unspecified amount.

In a speech at the National Press Club last week, the Minister Assisting the PM for Cybersecurity, Dan Tehan, warned that Australia remains vulnerable to a ‘cyberstorm’, an attack that could knock out power, telecommunications, emergency services and financial networks. Tehan admitted that the government had much to do to protect Australia from cyber threats, and that implementation of the Cyber Security Strategy should be accelerated. His focus is on making government departments accountable for their own security, greater transparency from government on cyber security incidents, fighting cybercrime, and protecting critical infrastructure. Tehan also announced that he’ll initiate quarterly meetings with business leaders to discuss cyber security, starting in December.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced that Australia is conducting offensive cyber operations against the Islamic State. The PM wouldn’t be drawn on exactly what was being done, but was careful to note that Australia’s offensive cyber operations against IS are subject to the same Rules of Engagement, legal oversight and consistency with international law as Australia’s kinetic military capabilities in the Middle East. The nature of offensive cyber operations is usually obscured for operational security reasons, but ICPC fellow Jim Lewis’ publication ‘Cyberspace and armed forces’ gives some insight. Lewis notes that ‘most cyberattacks will produce intangible effects. Expanding the ‘fog of war’ creates indecision and slows opponents’ reactions in ways that confer military advantage.’

The PM also announced last week that Julie Inman Grant will be Australia’s new eSafety Commissioner, filling the post left vacant by Alastair MacGibbon. Inman Grant will be responsible for implementing the new online reporting tool for revenge pornography announced by government in October as part of the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women.

There have been several hacking incidents across the world this week. The Japan Times has reported that Japan’s Ministry of Defense and Self Defense Force’s internal network, the Defense Information Infrastructure, was breached in September by a ‘sophisticated cyberattack.’ It’s believed that the hackers gained access to the National Defense Academy network and then used it to hop across to the Ministry’s network and exfiltrate an unknown quantity of data. The Ministry has declined to comment, but it’s been reported that internal internet use has been temporarily banned.

A ransomware infection on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (known as Muni) has been a boon for commuters, who were able to travel for free last weekend when ticketing machines were taken offline. The hackers have demanded 100 bitcoins, about US$73,000 to provide the encryption keys to unlock just over 2,000 infected terminals. The hackers have also threatened to release 30 gigabytes of data including customer information if the ransom isn’t paid. Muni was able to restore its system using backups and didn’t pay the ransom.

In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has hinted that hackers were the cause of a network outage that affected 900,000 people over the weekend. The outage has only affected customers using routers with ‘certain software’, indicating that the issue was caused by hackers and not a broader network issue. The company’s IT security chief has told newspaper Das Tagesspiel that it was likely the result of a botched attempt to use the routers as part of a botnet and Kaspersky researchers have identified ‘Mirai-related’ activity on affected routers. Deutsche Telekom is currently rolling out firmware upgrades on routers from Taiwanese company Arcadyn Technology to address the issue.

And finally closer to home, the head of Telecom Fiji has said that the country’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence that his company’s firewalls block more than 1,000 cyber threats a day. He encouraged the Fijian Government to do more to address cyber threats, and suggested they focus on insider threats and cybercriminals.

Making census of damned statistics

Image courtesy of Flickr user Peter Kelly

‘There are only two people I trust, God and the Commonwealth Statistician.’

So said Billy Hughes—statesman and patriot, renegade and mountebank—Australia’s seventh prime minister and federal MP for a record 51 years.

Whatever the trust in God these days, the Bureau of Statistics has just shredded its Hughes-conferred mantle.

Stats has run an unhappy experiment to see if a great Commonwealth institution can burn a century of trust in a single night.

The Bureau was trading on its long and august history—trust us!—by keeping name and address data from the census for four years to create ‘linkage keys’ for data from other sources (health, traffic, education, criminal). Some federal pollies protested they’d refuse to put their names on the census form. Not much Hughes-like trust there.

Then the debacle on census night, last Tuesday, when the Bureau took down the online census site because of distributed denial of service attempts and failures of the ABS’ systems.

Tuesday’s failure caused a prime ministerial explosion that Billy Hughes would have enjoyed while being surprised at the target.

Malcolm Turnbull birched the Bureau for a stuff up that should have been predicted, planned for and prevented: ‘I, too, am very angry about this. I am bitterly disappointed about this. This has clearly been a failure on the part of the ABS, absolutely.’

As with all good Canberra stories, this can be sliced and diced in many ways. Here are some slices.

Trust and Oz institutions: Stats is a fine example of the way Australia does public institutions—practical and pragmatic but with a big pinch of principle. As the Billy Hughes quote illustrates, politicians can’t fiddle with Australia’s figures—no Chinese massage or Argentine argy-bargy with our statistics.

From the very start of white settlement, the figures had to be right and reliable. The yearly statistical dispatch to London tracked the new colony’s population and available food supplies. Get the figures wrong and convicts and guards go hungry.

Today the ABS tracks inflation, provides the population data for electoral boundaries, and its data determines tax distributions among the states. And no political finger dips into one digit of the data. Such quality public institutions are an international competitive advantage as well as great national resource.

Competence: As the sage H.L. Mencken observed: ‘The older I get, the more I long for simple competence.’ Unfortunately, competence is seldom simple. And in the digital era, unlike the analogue age, there aren’t shades of success. The binary/digital stuff either works or it doesn’t. Suddenly the old-fashioned pencil-and-paper approach of the other big national count we’ve just done—the federal election—looks reassuringly resilient. After the ABS debacle anyone pushing for electronic voting systems in the Australian Electoral Commission will risk a stint in the silly corner.

Digital disruption to digital disrepute: Now even the most computer illiterate Canberra manager knows the difference between a hack and a distributed denial of service attack. Not least in the ABS humiliation is the Turnbull shaft that Stats took down its own site ‘out of an abundance of caution’ after being spooked by anomalous traffic that was quite innocent.

Damage report: The online census reopened on Thursday, 48 hours after going off-line, on advice from the Australian Signals Directorate that it was safe to try again. No personal information has been lost, stolen or mishandled.

Cuts have impacts: The ABS has suffered the budget squeeze. It no longer has the staff to do a full range of statistical surveys. Like so much of the Australian public service, continual budget cuts can eat at a great institution.

As Laura Tingle notes, ‘the ABS has been the subject of a long-term degradation in its capacity under both sides of politics. A sign of the neglect—even contempt—in which the bureau seemed to be held by the Abbott government was that the job of chief statistician was left empty for almost a year… It has lost hundreds of millions of dollars from its budget in recent years and hundreds of people over the best part of a decade. In January 2014 it sought a $300 million bailout, arguing that its financial position left it “with barely enough cash to keep the lights on”.’

Stats was struggling with a 40-year-old IT system and inadequate resources, which led to …

The consultant curse, consultant charm: The computer/software companies have enjoyed golden decades in Canberra. If the project goes well, the consultants leave as rich heroes; if it tanks, they still leave rich.

Stats gave its money and trust to IBM and was left holding an ugly baby. It’s a nasty, public version of what’s now an old Canberra yarn.

Outsourcing of computer and data functions is a regular source of dark farce and black comedy. How much can the public service outsource before it loses control of what it’s supposed to be administering?

A few recent comments by that well-known computer nerd Malcolm Turnbull suggest the PM’s less-than-gruntled view about the impact of outsourcing. Old decisions linger to haunt. The ABS wasn’t in control of its own fate because it wasn’t in control.

Retribution will follow: Heads will roll. First, there’ll be an inquiry. Billy Hughes would understand the order. Some political customs are ageless.

Cyberlessons: The review by the Government Cyber Security Adviser, Alastair MacGibbon, can be more than the witch hunt to select appropriate heads. Earlier this year, MacGibbon and Turnbull offered useful metrics.

Releasing the Cyber Security Strategy in April, the Prime Minister pledged to be more explicit about cyber-crime successes and failures and hack attacks: ‘Only by acknowledging, explaining and analysing the problem can we hope to impose costs on perpetrators and empower our private citizens and government agencies and businesses to take effective security measures.’

Alastair MacGibbon posed the dilemma: ‘The question is how open a government can be about cyber-security without causing further damage and without hanging out all the government’s crown jewels?’

The disaster all happened in plain sight. A full public accounting will serve that Turnbull aim of empowering citizens and agencies.

The Bureau of Statistics is an institutional jewel that needs a bit of burnishing to deal with the tarnish on the trust.

Rudd’s run: the race for the UN secretary-generalship

Image courtesy of Flickr user TED Conference

Now everyone’s had their say. Some branded the decision to not nominate Kevin Rudd for UN Secretary General as puerile and pathetic, while others preferred to pretend the decision was simply a ‘difficult’ one on which to make a call. One brave soul has even suggested that Rudd’s bid for power mightn’t be over yet, and that the former PM still has a chance of getting the gig by being nominated by a future President Hillary Clinton.

Personally, I’d suggest that even advancing such a scenario demonstrates a unique detachment from reality. The real point about Rudd’s bid is that the entire affair has occupied far more space in the media than it ever deserved. The best treatment of the entire issue probably came from sketch-writer Tony Wright. A keen observer of the Australian scene, he was far more concerned about chronicling the slow hiss of deflating egos, rather than rushing in to join the queues waiting to either praise or condemn Turnbull’s decision.

The key point about the entire affair is something we in the media far too often lose sight of here in Australia. Rudd was a rank outsider. Even Gareth Evans, one of the former PM’s boosters, admitted as much on The Strategist on Tuesday. Evans suggested Rudd was, ‘at best, a fairly long-shot candidate’. The former Foreign Minister was being far too diplomatic. What he should have said is that Rudd had no chance at all. And that’s really the key to interpreting the entire episode.

For Rudd’s bid to succeed it would have been necessary for everybody to: a) forget the desire to see a woman occupying the position, b) ignore precedent suggesting an East European should get the job, c) suggest Rudd could have overcome a dozen other credible candidates who’ve already put themselves forward for the job, bolstered by the support of their governments, d) brush over the reality that even before the cabinet decision there was far less than unanimous backing for Rudd within Labor, let alone the government and e) dismiss the fact that Rudd had run a dysfunctional office as PM and there has never been any indication that he’s changed his ways.

It beggars belief to even suggest Rudd could ever have been a plausible candidate.

Begin at this point and the discussion within Cabinet decision comes into clearer focus. Some, like Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, were indeed opposed to Rudd on domestic political grounds, but it would be wrong to insist that Julie Bishop’s proposal didn’t begin from a similar basis.

The DFAT submission wasn’t in the nature of an unqualified backing at all. In fact the just retired head of the department, Peter Varghese, reportedly opposed the decision to nominate Rudd. Try putting on your domestic political hat and Bishop’s case for advancing Rudd’s case looks clear. She knew there was never any real danger of him getting the job but in the future, when it came time to appoint conservatives to plum overseas positions, she could claim she was acting in the national interest. In addition it would make Turnbull appear ‘statesmanlike’.

The trouble is she would never have changed the minds of the Rudd/Labor partisans. They would first have complained that the government didn’t support his bid properly, and then would have found plenty of other reasons to object to other overseas appointments anyway.

Turnbull only encouraged Rudd early on because he genuinely believed his predecessor would realise his tilt was doomed to fail. When Rudd obstinately insisted in pushing ahead, Turnbull told him (months ago) to drop his bid. Any ‘confusion’; any ‘embarrassment’, is entirely due to Rudd’s refusal to listen to repeated warnings and then ignoring them in his one-sided leak of his own pleading letters to the PM.

The question was never, ‘will we back Rudd’, but rather, ’should he have been nominated’. When Rudd asked Australia to endorse his bit, he was also asking us to make a choice. We would have to give up any possible influence we might have had in shaping the contest, simply to endorse his delusion.

His bid has already begun sucking the oxygen from the tilt of another former antipodean Labour PM, Helen Clark, for the job. She had started with a triple advantage over Rudd in that she was a successful woman, (tick) who won three national elections (tick) and is also the current head of the UN Development Program (another tick). None of the Permanent Five have any reason to veto her for personal dysfunction and she was initially seen as having a real chance of success. Her competitors have used every possible reason to diminish her candidacy. Rudd’s undeclared bid, splitting the Pacific support that Clark depended on, hasn’t helped.

Put Clark’s record of achievement up against Rudd’s and it becomes difficult to find any reason to nominate him. Except, of course, the oldest one of all.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!

But is it really that important to beat New Zealand?

Australia’s puerile politics on the global stage

Image courtesy of Flickr user Aftab Uzzaman

For students of incomprehensible behavior by otherwise apparently intelligent leaders, Australian politics is the gift that keeps on giving. The latest example is the decision by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government, just re-elected by a razor-thin margin, to deny former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd the formal nomination he needed to join the race to be the next UN Secretary-General.

The decision defies not only the merits of the case and well-established precedent, but also the government’s own need for a more bipartisan spirit to develop if it is to get any of its major legislation through the Australian Parliament. It will be embarrassing internationally as well—seen as petty, partisan, and vindictive by most governments around the world, regardless of whether they would be inclined to support Rudd.

And it will be particularly embarrassing for Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who argued that whatever distaste her conservative coalition colleagues had for the former Labor leader, it was wrong to stop a prominent Australian from seeking a position for which he was regarded internationally as manifestly qualified. Her government didn’t have to campaign actively for him—just not stand in his way.

Rudd’s qualifications for the job should not be in doubt. He is a diplomat by training, a brilliant linguist with a first-class policy mind, who in government won plaudits internationally for his leading role in the G20 response to the global financial crisis of 2008, his efforts on climate change, and his historic apology to Australia’s indigenous peoples. In his political afterlife, he chairs a major international commission on multilateralism, runs the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, and has been a thoughtful advocate—respected highly both in Washington and Beijing—for strategies to manage better the US-China relationship.

True, his temperament and management style have been an issue in domestic politics, and partly explain the tumultuous leadership changes that have given Australians five different prime ministers in the last nine years. But it is hardly unusual for political leaders to be seen, by party colleagues and opponents alike, as falling short of sainthood. If the Security Council members whose votes will elect the next Secretary-General think that this is an issue, they will decide accordingly.

In fact, for all his skill and credibility, Rudd was always at best a fairly long-shot candidate. He is neither East European nor a woman, both seen as advantages this time round. He has likely veto problems with Russia in particular. And—perhaps most problematic of all—he is not likely to satisfy the five permanent Security Council members’ traditional preference for a secretary rather than a general, someone who doesn’t rock their boat too much. Making waves is what Rudd does.

Rudd would also have been coming into the race rather late, in an environment where probably his strongest male, non-East European competitor, former UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres, has a clear head start in early Security Council straw polling. But no one yet knows with any certainty how the veto endgame will play out, and Rudd should certainly have been given the opportunity to take his chances.

Until now, Australian politics has upheld a long and civilized tradition of support across party lines for those seen as being credible candidates for international positions. For example, despite the bitter divisions generated by conservative leader Malcolm Fraser’s role in the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government in 1975, I spent a year as Labor Foreign Minister in the early 1990s campaigning for Fraser to be elected Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. And when I left politics myself a few years later, John Howard’s conservative government graciously supported my bid (equally quixotic as it turned out) to lead UNESCO.

What makes the abandonment of this tradition in the Rudd case not only indecent but politically wrong-headed is that Turnbull’s government has just been elected with at best a one-vote majority in the House of Representatives, and nothing resembling a majority at all in the Senate, which now has a cast of independents and minor parties that has been likened to the bar scene in Star Wars.

Turnbull’s government will need every vote it can get to pass its legislative program, and in a number of cases will simply have to rely on opposition Labor support. But the Rudd decision has left a very bad taste in Labor mouths, and in those of some other independents as well.

The lesson of the last election, in which voters continued to drift away from the major parties to the single-issue fringe, seemed to be that the electorate was fed up with sloganeering and personality politics, and were genuinely crying out for more bipartisanship on major policy issues.

Instead, Turnbull has subordinated whatever rational and civilized instincts he was thought to retain to the demands of the small-minded extreme conservatives in his party. That is yet another reason why Rudd’s loss is also Australia’s. The need for adult supervision of Australian politics continues.