Tag Archive for: policymaking

Another Munich crisis? Understanding the limits of policymaking by analogy

We see it often enough. A democracy deals with an authoritarian state, and those who oppose concessions cite the lesson of Munich 1938: make none to dictators; take a firm stand.

And so we hear those voices today as US President Donald Trump proposes that Ukraine sacrifice territory for peace with Russia.

This is not to say that those who cite the lesson of Munich are always wrong, or even wrong in this case. It’s just that they may not always be right. More generally, we need to understand the limits of historical analogies. Use them with caution.

Historical reasoning, as former US defense secretary Ashton Carter put it, is ‘the dominant mental methodology of real policymakers’. The use of historical analogy has deep roots in the way humans think, to the point where it’s more unreasonable to expect it not to influence policymaking. Political scientists identify four sources of analogies—study, tradition, memory, and experience.

It is well-documented that president John F Kennedy’s approach to the Cuban Missile Crisis was informed by Barbara Tuchman’s account of the outbreak of World War I. This deeper study is also exceptional; given the demands of policy work, officials are rarely able to develop historical awareness beyond what they passively develop through cultural or institutional tradition.

This is why a small number of well-worn analogies get the most airtime. Few who refer to the Munich Agreement know it in fine detail. Even fewer have first-hand experience with it, as Anthony Eden did when confronting General Nasser in 1956. Yet personal experience and vicarious memory are by far the most common sources of analogy.

But historical analogies are persuasive: a study published in February shows that appeal to historical analogy in public messaging can swing opinion in favour of a given foreign policy action by about 7 percent. It’s not that we misuse historical analogies in a motivated or biased way, but rather that historical analogies are typically used by those who are already motivated reasoners.

Also, foreign policy issues generally aren’t compatible with scientific method, let alone mathematical certainty. What we refer to as ‘international order’ is a way of coping with this by artificially introducing regularity and predictability into a domain that, by nature, has none. Successes have here been modest at the best of times, and in moments of crisis, history is all that’s left to inform our actions. Thus, as order frays and crisis becomes persistent, analogies—to Athens and Sparta, to 1930s Europe, to the Cold War—become more relevant.

But the flaw in reasoning by historical analogy is more intrinsic. What historian Yuen Foong Khong called analogical explanation—drawing analogies with historical examples to grasp and evaluate new situations and forecast likely outcomes of action—has the same logical structure, and the same weaknesses, whether it’s being used to decide where to take a new date for dinner or if a country should invade Iraq.

Consider how critics have drawn on the Munich analogy in recent weeks. If, they analogise, the Trump administration allows Russia’s seizure of eastern Ukraine as the Allies allowed Nazi Germany’s seizure of the Sudetenland, then Russia’s assurances of ‘peace in our time’ are no more trustworthy than Germany’s.

The circumstances of Ukraine today and Czechoslovakia in September 1938 resemble each other on some points but differ on countless others. To draw the analogy is to decide that determining factors in the present are held in common with the past, while the points of difference are unimportant: that Nazi Germany did not possess nuclear weapons, for instance.

This view is defensible, but that isn’t the point. The point is that this view is, on its face, much harder to defend than the view that we are today simply in a Munich-like situation in Ukraine.

This leads to a core insight from Richard Neustadt and Ernest May. Policymakers are going to analogise from history regardless, so we must improve how they do it, and try to avoid disaster.

To Neustadt and May, there’s no substitute for historical awareness, and using a wider range of historical analogies often leads to more productive consideration of an issue than fixating on a single, hackneyed one. But those who use these analogies must understand that, in doing so, they are committing to definite claims about what is and isn’t causally effective, morally relevant, or both, in the course of history. Without this understanding, any number of historical analogies could be misused.

A more disciplined approach can be as complex as convening a panel of historians to give advice, or as simple as asking: what new evidence would I need to consider this historical analogy implausible?

Does Biden’s Russia policy need a bigger dose of realism?

Was the current crisis in Ukraine caused by a lack of realism in US foreign policy? According to some analysts, the liberal desire to spread democracy is what drove NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders, causing Russian President Vladimir Putin to feel increasingly threatened. Viewed from this perspective, it’s not surprising that he would respond by demanding a sphere of influence analogous to what the United States once claimed in Latin America with its Monroe Doctrine.

But there’s a problem with this realist argument: NATO’s 2008 decision (heavily promoted by the George W. Bush administration) to invite Georgia and Ukraine eventually to join the alliance can hardly be called liberal, nor was it driven by liberals. In making such arguments, realists point to the aftermath of World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson’s liberalism contributed to a legalistic and idealist foreign policy that ultimately failed to prevent World War II.

Accordingly, in the 1940s, scholars such as Hans Morgenthau and diplomats like George Kennan warned Americans that they must henceforth base their foreign policy on realism. As Morgenthau explained in 1948, ‘[A] state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action.’ Or, in the more recent words of the University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer: ‘States operate in a self-help world in which the best way to survive is to be as powerful as possible, even if that requires pursuing ruthless policies. That is not a pretty story, but there is no better alternative if survival is a country’s paramount goal.’

In a famous historical example of this approach, Winston Churchill, in 1940, ordered an attack on French naval vessels, killing some 1,300 of Britain’s allies rather than letting the fleet fall into Hitler’s hands. Churchill also authorised the bombing of German civilian targets.

But while many observers justified those decisions when Britain’s survival was at stake, they condemned the February 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, because victory in Europe was already assured at that point. Churchill could invoke the necessity of survival to justify overriding moral rules in the early days of the war, but he was wrong to continue to do so later, when survival was not in doubt.

In general, such dire straits are rare, and most leaders are eclectic in selecting the mental maps with which they navigate the world. Hence, when Donald Trump was asked to explain his mild reaction to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he said, ‘America first! The world is a very dangerous place!’

When realists describe the world as if moral choices don’t exist, they are merely disguising their own choice. Survival may come first, but it is hardly the only value worth upholding. Most of international politics today is not about survival at all. Smart realists might not urge NATO to extend membership to Ukraine, but nor would they support abandoning that country altogether.

After all, a smart realist knows about different types of power. No president can lead at home or abroad without power; but power is about more than bombs, bullets and resources. There are three ways to get others to do what you want: coercion (sticks), payment (carrots) and attraction (soft power). A full understanding of power encompasses all three aspects.

If others around the world associate a country with certain moral positions, that recognition confers soft power. But because soft power is slow-acting and rarely sufficient by itself, leaders will always be tempted to deploy the hard power of coercion or payment. They must bear in mind that, when wielded alone, hard power can involve higher costs than when it is combined with the soft power of attraction. The Roman Empire rested not only on its legions but also on the attractiveness of Roman culture.

In the Cold War’s early days, the Soviet Union enjoyed a good deal of soft power in Europe, because it had stood up to Hitler. But it squandered that goodwill when it used hard military power to suppress freedom movements in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The US, by contrast, combined a military presence in Europe after the war with aid to support European recovery under the Marshall Plan.

A country’s soft power rests on its culture, its values and its policies (when they are seen by others as legitimate). In America’s case, soft power has often been reinforced by the narratives that US presidents use to explain their foreign policies. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, for example, framed their policies in ways that attracted support both at home and abroad, whereas Richard Nixon and Trump were less successful in winning over those outside the US.

In a world of sovereign states, realism in crafting foreign policy is unavoidable. But too many realists stop there, rather than acknowledging that cosmopolitanism and liberalism often have something important to contribute. Realism is thus a necessary but insufficient basis for foreign policy.

The question is one of degree. Since there is never perfect security, an administration must decide how much security will be assured before it incorporates other values such as freedom, identity or rights into its foreign policy. Foreign-policy choices often pit values against practical or commercial interests, such as when the US decides to sell arms to authoritarian allies, or to condemn China for its human-rights record. When realists treat such trade-offs as similar to Churchill’s decision to attack the French fleet, they are simply ducking the hard moral questions.

But President Joe Biden cannot ignore the issue. His diplomatic challenge today is to find a way to avoid war without abandoning Ukraine or the values that sustain America’s soft power and network of alliances.

Benchmarking critical technologies in an era of strategic competition

Technology policy formulation has gained a renewed importance for governments in the era of strategic competition, but contextual understanding and expertise in deciding where to focus efforts are lacking. As a result, it’s difficult to judge whether a country’s research and development output, no matter how advanced, and its development of production capacity, no matter how significant, align with the country’s intended strategic objectives or can be used effectively to achieve them.

The ability to measure the relative strengths and weaknesses of a country by weighing specific strategic objectives against technical achievements is of paramount importance for countries. This is especially true as nations seek to resolve supply-chain resilience problems underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A new pilot project at ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre focuses on a handful of critical technologies in the context of strategic partnership and strategic competition. Specifically, we focus on the biotechnology and energy technology sectors in China and in the Quad countries of Australia, India, Japan and the United States. During the Quad leaders’ summit in March 2021, a Quad working group on critical and emerging technology was announced. The communiqué from the summit said that the new group was intended to ‘ensure the way in which technology is designed, developed, governed and used is shaped by the Quad countries’ shared values and respect for universal human rights’.

The communiqué didn’t directly name China, but China was clearly implied in the Quad leaders’ pledge to recommit to ‘promoting the free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law and undaunted by coercion, to bolster security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and beyond’. China’s rejection of the Quad’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific, willingness to use economic coercion and the resulting strategic competition call further attention to multiple technology sectors’ heavy reliance on a single source. A solution must be found that can exploit synergy across technology sectors among collaborating countries while ensuring supply-chain resilience.

‘Critical technologies’ broadly refers to strategically important technology areas. Australia, for example, defines ‘critical technology’ as ‘technology that can significantly enhance or pose risks to Australia’s national interests, including our prosperity, social cohesion and national security’. To assess national capabilities, we measured each country’s R&D and infrastructure development efforts using patent and patent impact data and academic impact data and compared those results against the country’s technology-specific policy goals.

We found that success in connecting policy objectives to outcomes isn’t yet entirely measurable. This assessment is no doubt at least partially because the development of policy objectives postdates most of our data. Our comparison of national policies pertaining to each critical technology we research shows that China, followed by the US, tends to have more clarity about what it seeks to achieve by investing in R&D and production capabilities and by following that up with actions that will achieve those objectives. India, Japan and Australia don’t lack policy development or innovative capacity, but we believe they have been less effective at connecting concepts to capability.

We also noted that our ways of understanding the impact and quality of research and patent applications don’t necessarily answer questions on the ways in which they help a country achieve strategic objectives associated with those technologies. One patent, for example, can significantly influence the evolution of a technology; others might incrementally advance knowledge or create offshoot fields. Australia and India, and to a lesser extent Japan, filed far fewer patents than the US and China, but the impact of those few patents was more on par with that of US patents, which were high in both number and impact. In China, a disproportionately large number of patents were filed internally, but our findings showed that the competitive impact of those patents was low. Yet the competitive impact of a patent in terms of its ability to significantly influence the evolution of a field and the ability of R&D to meet strategic aims are two different things.

We assess that Chinese companies tend to patent-specific applications of technology. This indicates a fast-paced and iterative approach to technology delivery in China. We believe the knock-on effect of the incentive structure in China is that the R&D base is disadvantaged, while companies and researchers focus on implementing specific applications of technology that meet policy needs. Companies may be seeking to achieve those objectives by owning the market first, and patents support that approach. They’re adding economic value by increasing the quantity of applications, and owning the market comes before efforts to refine the product.

Chinese companies export their products globally, and they are probably achieving some market power and incumbency even if the product quality is by objective metrics inferior. This pattern might be more pronounced across the other critical technologies ASPI ICPC will examine as the project evolves in 2022, such as artificial intelligence, data science and data storage technologies.

It is hard to know, in China’s case, whether R&D is having the intended policy effect. But the general implications of its approach still pose a significant challenge for Quad nations as they seek to move more rapidly from concept to capability.

Governments must engage with Australia’s future leaders to meet the challenges ahead

A national survey conducted at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic indicated that Australian governments’ handling of the crisis had considerably increased Australians’ faith in their governments. This is reassuring, yet the threat from Covid-19 may be temporarily masking another long-term problem for our nation—a worrying decline in young Australians’ confidence in their political leaders.

The 2019 Australian election study by the Australian National University indicated that public confidence in political leaders and institutions was at an all-time low, as was public satisfaction with democracy. Given the increasingly challenging national and international outlook, it’s not clear how long the improved sentiments highlighted by the more recent survey will last. Should governments get caught up in internal politics and stop listening to their constituents, particularly already disenchanted youth, they would risk a significant proportion of citizens having no trust in our democratic system.

Politicians and the broader society must recognise that young Australians are pushing beyond the conventional and getting creative as active citizens. They must support active citizenship both through a solid civic education curriculum and by creating space in policy conversations for young people to feel that they are heard.

Traditional methods of active citizenship such as writing letters to local ministers and being involved in local political groups are still important, but too often young people can feel that their voices aren’t heard in these platforms. Put off by standard responses like ‘Thank you for your letter’ or ‘This has been taken under consideration’ without any substantial policy action, they are finding innovative ways to have an impact in local and national politics.

Before the pandemic, young people across the globe led protests through city streets calling for government action on climate change. These climate strikes, occurring on the same day across state and national borders, had an impact on the global community, generating extensive international debate.

These opportunities to engage in active citizenship are not always accessible, especially for those in regional and remote communities. Too often there’s little or no encouragement in smaller communities for young people to be civically active. There’s an unspoken expectation that any citizen should speak up on issues that they’re passionate about, but if they haven’t been shown how to and haven’t been supported by their communities or local politicians, why should they put themselves out there when the reality of being ignored is all too common?

School communities play an important role in supporting students to participate in democratic processes, and it’s crucial for them to provide a rounded civic education. It’s encouraging to hear that some primary schools are running structured school parliaments and teaching students about civic institutions and processes in a participatory way. While we build this foundation, society and our politicians must support young voters and encourage them to be inquisitive and to get involved.

Encouraging our young people includes recognising the ways in which they voice their opinions and concerns as legitimate and identifiable forms of advocacy. It’s not surprising that they turn to the platforms they know best, social media, to engage, speak out and organise a movement.

Visual platforms such as Instagram have hosted movements such as #blackouttuesday, ‘Challenge Accepted’ and #bringbackourgirls (which was supported by first lady Michelle Obama). What was intended to be a one-day march in Nigeria’s capital became a movement that gained international recognition and continued for several years.

Acknowledging these movements and their messages is essential for politicians to connect with their electorates, particularly their youngest voters.

As our future leaders, young Australians must be part of policy discussions. We need to arm them with the tools to participate; encourage and recognise their participation; and provide them with a strong civic education. As the director of the Whitlam Institute, Leanne Smith, stated in a recent report: ‘If we want our children to have a stake in our democracy and our society, we have to treat them as valued citizens and engage with their concerns.’

As Australia’s experience with Covid has demonstrated, politicians across jurisdictions and party lines can work cooperatively despite falling on different sides of the political divide. However, this situation can quickly devolve into acrimony and a news cycle reminiscent of a soap opera.

With an uncertain economic future, a changing climate and the ever-present possibility of another devastating Covid outbreak, politicians will need to work hard to maintain voter confidence. To strengthen Australia’s democracy for a challenging future, they need to start by engaging young people in political processes, most importantly in policy development.

Disinformation threatens evidence-based policymaking

Disinformation often raises concerns about influencing politicians and the outcome of elections and about fostering extremism. Most of us are familiar with the tag ‘fake news’ and with inadvertent or deliberate disinformation spread through social media platforms. If governments do respond to it, they tend to focus on its immediate impacts instead of its long-term distortion of sound evidence-based policy.

Evidence-based decision-making has been the central feature of Australia’s policy landscape since the late 1990s. Putting aside debates about what constitutes evidence, this approach is thought to best serve policymaking by minimising the influence of ideology. However, concerns about data being ‘concocted, cherry-picked or manipulated to suit a predetermined position’ perpetuate and fuel the purist’s desire for more and more detailed information.

The trend is also for policy and advice to be ‘informed’ by evidence rather than based on it, which further downplays the significance of a reliable evidence base.

That said, the convergence of disinformation and ideology in a world rich with social media means that it’s sometimes difficult to locate reliable evidence. Filter bubbles and echo chambers allow us to push and pull the information that best suits our personal perspective on most things. Mainstream media’s response is to fact-check political leaders to keep them on the straight and narrow.

Pick any topical issue and you’ll find many examples. While the experience of Covid-19 is reinforcing our reliance on expert scientific advice, that’s not an automatic response for everyone. Some of us continue to retreat into the fear and misinformation spread on social media by ‘experts’. We’ve witnessed this in relation to state border closures, and it continues with disquiet over border permit systems and confusion over which Covid vaccine is best.

Those examples demonstrate that good policy is easily understood and squeezes out opportunities for disinformation.

The challenge to the evidence base will continue, given the way some politicians embrace and, at times, actively perpetuate disinformation. We don’t need to look far to find promoters of disinformation in Australian politics: serial social media offender Craig Kelly has done his best to take the lead in coronavirus disinformation from celebrity chef Pete Evans.

The concern about misinformation taking hold reminds me of the B-grade movie Idiocracy, in which the lead character is a test subject in a top-secret hibernation program that goes wrong. He wakes up 500 years in the future to discover that society has been dumbed down and he’s now the most intelligent person alive. In that world, weird things, such as irrigating vegetables with soft drink, are commonplace. Knowledge underpinned by evidence doesn’t exist. The plot is all a bit extreme, of course.

Or is it? Two-thirds of respondents to an Australian online survey about access to Covid-19 information say social media is the main source of misinformation. However, fewer than a quarter of those surveyed said that they’d encountered ‘a lot of misinformation’ about Covid-19.

On the positive side, younger news consumers in Australia are more sceptical of online information. So, while the advice of the real experts is increasingly being challenged by the armchair variety, in Australia at least, it may be having less impact than we fear.

The problem arises when disinformation becomes a substitute for evidence. The National Archives of Australia publication Building trust in the public record notes, ‘The Australian Public Service needs authentic, complete and reliable information to make evidence-based decisions, provide sound advice, develop good policy and deliver services and programs effectively.’ Collecting, managing and accessing reliable information are the keys to reversing declining trust in evidence.

Some say misinformation is putting democracy at risk. The US experience of recent weeks provided ample opportunity for commentary. Debating whether democracy is for the vocal minority or the silent majority misses the point. The role of democratic governments isn’t to blindly favour the misinformed and disinformed views of a particular group. Governments must rule for all, consistent with national values, and not disregard, disenfranchise or marginalise other voices and needs.

Last year, Francis Fukuyama noted that ‘social media have enormously greater power to amplify certain voices’ and that in America there are ‘calls for the government to regulate internet platforms in order to preserve democratic discourse itself’. However, action by governments isn’t always needed, particularly if traditional news media are able to challenge disinformation.

After the violence at the Capitol in Washington DC, social media and internet platforms banned users and shut down groups engaging in violent discourse. Donald Trump’s Twitter accounts were closed, and Amazon, Apple and Google suspended the pro-Trump social media platform Parler. Those companies acted in their own capacity, which reinforced for many that they acted too late.

In a world where everyone can be a commentator or a publisher, we need to ask, who decides what is said and what influence it should have, and who decides what role the public sector should play in challenging disinformation to avoid the distortion of the policy evidence base?

The challenge is multiplied many times over for an independent and non-partisan public sector. Rebuilding trust in our institutions requires more than delivering during a pandemic. The prime minister says the public service needs to focus on ‘getting the right data, the right evidence, and the right reporting’. More importantly, a reliable evidence base supports a sharper focus on long-term thinking and planning.

To avoid the disinformation trap, the public service must more effectively leverage authentic and reliable information. It also should actively respond to disinformation through authoritative strategic communications that focus us on the facts. We’ve experienced the benefits of this through Covid, and it needs to become a key feature of a redefined role for the public service.

How the Australian public service really works: truth and consequences

‘We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.’

— Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg

‘Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.’

— Charles de Gaulle, President of France

All politicians battle with Juncker’s dilemma and de Gaulle’s conundrum, while bureaucrats stand back and try to help. The relationship between politicians and public servants is founded on such predicaments.

The bond between these two very different tribes is captured by a simple (and simplistic) division of functions: the job of politicians is to gain and use power; the job of public servants is to tell the truth to their masters in the service of government.

Drawing on 50 years in journalism (mostly in Canberra), ASPI’s Graeme Dobell offers his unholy trinity of how politicians use power:

  1. It’s always personal.
  2. There’s always a deal.
  3. Follow the money.

For public servants, the first two rules shift dramatically:

  1. It’s never personal.
  2. Evidence should always drive the decision.
  3. Follow the money.

Who gets the blame? One key rule of the relationship between the two classes is that ministers get the credit when policies succeed, while public servants get the blame when policies fail. Think of Paul Keating’s enduring stunt (he’s still doing it) of blaming the Reserve Bank for the 1991 recession. This is a remarkable rhetorical transfer of responsibility from a politician who always boasted that he pulled the levers.

Nevertheless, standing close to the fire, top public servants have some sympathy for the heat on their political masters.

Ministerial tribulations. Ministers have their problems, some of them genuine. It’s lonely: there are few people a minister can trust.

Prime ministers are not reliable friends, so one should not rely too much on support from the top. The backing of parliamentary colleagues is always conditional. And, as Gladys Berejiklian recently found out, you can’t rely on those you have close personal links with, either. A good principle for all politicians: ‘Your enemies you can trust because you know where they stand—it’s your friends you must watch.’ Et tu, Bruté.

One of the sharpest distillations of what ministers face is offered by the former Labor cabinet minister John Kerin:

  • Other people will always let you down.
  • You will inevitably let others down.
  • In the longer run, the best policies are the best politics, but do not tell the rank and file, the prime minister or the mob.
  • Policy analysis always beats the divining of chickens’ entrails, opinion polls or the consensus of editorials.
  • Some of the best policies are carried out by stealth.
  • The choice between seizing the moment and compromise is always vexed.
  • ‘All political careers end in failure.’ — Enoch Powell

Rather than invoking Machiavelli in support of Kerin, here’s Gough Whitlam (long after leaving parliament): ‘The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.’

So politicians need to be resilient in Canberra and pretty tough when back in their electorates, remembering Churchill’s line that ‘the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter’.

Truth and trials. Faced with these realities, what should a good public servant do? Ultimately, hold to Kerin’s principle that good policy is good politics, while noting that stealth is often part of the game.

Previous columns talked about the different kinds of power available to public servants and the line to tread between ambiguity and action. The central guide is the idea of the public servant as a truth-teller to the minister in support of good government.

Telling the truth requires a tough and delicate touch. The gold standard was set by a legendary public servant, Frederick Wheeler, arguing with Gough Whitlam. The exasperated Whitlam snapped: ‘Shut up. I’ve heard everything.’

To which Wheeler replied: ‘Prime Minister, you will listen to me. I am drawing to your attention facts, your ignorance of which will bring you down.’

Canberra legend has it that this is the expurgated version; some pithy epithets were sprinkled through the actual exchange between the PM and Treasury secretary.

Swearing at the PM takes you close to the oblivion end of frank and fearless advice. The courage to do so is a long way from the tactics suggested in a well-known piece of middle-rank public service doggerel:

If they come for you—hide.
If they find you—lie.

The highest standard calls for the public servant to stand and give truth-telling testimony. The excitement can be as much in saying an adventurous ‘yes’ to a minister as a conservative ‘no’. Wheeler, on occasion, was prepared to urge public servants to put aside their natural caution and take a broad, adventurous view to serve their masters.

Tactics, traits and trails. Bureaucrats get close to their ministers so they can serve. But they also aim to draw on the power.

Ministerial backing is vital in the endless Canberra fights for which an aura of menace is always useful. Arrogance backed by substance often wins. And when attacked, players should strike back fast. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was familiar with the Washington swamp, observed that ‘a demonstrated capacity for reprisal serves valuably as a deterrent’.

Public servants must also write, because reading is a key trait of the tribe. In the truth-telling game, one of the great protections public servants have is the scope to tell the story from their own point of view, to make some permanent marks on the trail.

In judging public servants who have argued with the minister or prime minister, always follow the paper trail. The writing matters not just for the facts that are set down and the policies advocated but for the history that is preserved. The markers that are left will be important for those who will travel similar paths in future.

While being the keeper of the documents is an ancient art, Canberra has added another dimension to chronicling duty: Senate estimates hearings.

For public servants, giving evidence to one of the eight Senate committees is a combination of public-policy testimony and performance art.

Top bureaucrats should cherish, not dread, these inquisitions, as a chance to do the truth-telling three-step. Here’s parliament’s description of the intricate triangular dance involving parliament, ministers and bureaucrats:

Ministers are accountable to the parliament for the exercise of their ministerial authority and are responsible for the public advocacy and defence of government policy. Officials are accountable to ministers for the administration of government policy and programmes. Officials’ accountability regularly takes the form of a requirement for them to provide full and accurate information to the parliament about the factual and technical background to policies and their administration.

Ministers and minders, of course, are less than amused if the officials in their department get into the habit of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the Senate.

As mentioned, handling truth needs a touch both tough and delicate.

The art is to uphold the gold standard while upholding the minister, point to where the trash is buried, take the chance to confess to errors, and even hint at what good policy might look like.

How the Australian public service really works: policy

Watch what ministers do, not what they say

Discern what ministers mean, because ultimately that’s where they’ll head.

The public service must manage and massage the zigzags.

When what a minister proclaims gets too far from what’s wanted or needed by that minister (and faction and party and government), something has to give. Prepare for crash or shift, shuffle and course correction.

Such are the rules for any public servant grappling with the differences between nominal and real policy. These differences are important, even vital, in how power operates in Canberra.

Politicians and public servants seldom go near a public discussion of the nominal–real distinction.

Much sturm und drang will fall upon a minister (or bureaucrat) who admits to core and non-core promises, or that the figures are rubbery, or even that—perhaps, just, maybe—a small change in course might be needed. Doing any of this in front of a microphone risks entering the minefield of ‘broken promises’.

Economists, though, are used to talking about nominal and real prices. Nominal prices are the prices one sees on products every day. Real prices are the nominal prices adjusted for inflation. There’s a similar phenomenon in announcements about government policy: nominal policy is the label on top, while real policy is all the different stuff jumping around inside the box.

Nominal policy is what ministers say about things (reflected, for example, in daily press releases). But real policy is what they are actually thinking (hoping and plotting).

Power flows around and between these nominal and real poles. And sometimes when the poles get too far out of alignment—one going negative and the other positive—the sparks are spectacular.

The Liberal Party, for example, is having trouble juggling nominal policy on energy issues and climate change with real policy. Nominal policy is that Australia will meet all of its international obligations and will promote the use of renewables across the Australian economy. But real policy is to juggle the commitments to these goals so that it is unclear whether international commitments are within reach while, simultaneously, the use of a major fossil fuel, gas, is being promoted.

Compared to the Coalition, Labor is finding it somewhat easier to balance nominal and real climate change policy—although Joel Fitzgibbon quitting the front bench demonstrates Labor’s own problems.

On one hand, Labor woos the green vote by talking of the importance of environmental goals. Following last year’s election in the ACT, Labor reaffirmed its long alliance with the Greens and promised to pursue agreed environmental policies. At the very same time, the Labor government in Queensland had approved the go-ahead for the Olive Downs coking coal project in the Bowen Basin and was talking of the jobs that the new coal project would provide.

Perhaps the nicest description of the nominal–real balance was former Labor minister Gareth Evans’s defence of what he called ‘political dexterity’, offering a classic Evansism: ‘If you can’t ride two horses at once, you shouldn’t be in the bloody circus.’

Senior public servants are well aware of the differences involved in the balancing effort; they are confronted with the facts of real policy in their private meetings with ministers and discussions in ministerial offices.

Public statements provide, at best, a vague guide to what ministers really have in mind—one of many reasons that senior public servants strive to get ‘face time’ with ministers, set foot in Parliament House whenever possible, and speak to ministerial minders as often as possible.

So, if the visible is not a reliable guide to what ministers are thinking, how do you tell the difference? The simplest answer (a boiled-down version of the public service method) is that peering behind the screen involves observation multiplied by time: see what ministers and governments say, then over time observe what they actually do.

Often, public ministerial statements are designed to mislead. But ministerial actions usually provide a reliable guide to the real intentions and the real policies of governments. Watch what they do—watch the budgets, watch whom they meet, watch how they spend their time.

The froth of the nightly news matters, but it can mislead. Public pronouncements are power at play. What gets done is power in action.

Morality and public policy

Australian Senate

Everyone on the public payroll, military and civilian alike, has a duty to carry out the lawful instructions of government. They also have a duty to provide considered, honest and impartial advice to government, and to warn government of any policy, reputational or moral hazard it might face.

Equally, it’s not for anyone on the public payroll, military or civilian, to imagine that they are the government’s conscience. Ultimately, moral and political responsibility must rest with the elected decision-makers—the Minister and/or the Cabinet.

But the tension between ends and means in the execution of government decisions may create a dilemma for those charged with implementing them. For members of the ADF, this is nowhere more evident than in the formulation of Rules of Engagement (ROE) covering the use of lethal force.

With hands-on experience in developing ROE in both simulation exercises and ‘the real thing’ (Bougainville and INTERFET), I can attest to both the seriousness of the rule makers and the considered nature of the rules made. For the ADF, the development of ROE is informed by the various conventions and treaties to which Australia is party and, of course, by Australian law and the laws of the nation(s) in which the ADF might operate. And in the development and framing of joint ROE, it’s not uncommon for Australian ROE to be more restrictive than those of our allies.

Where ROE are not observed or otherwise defied, those responsible are usually charged and brought to justice. The appalling practices employed at the Abu Ghraib prison provide a salutary case in point.

If the use of potentially lethal force in armed conflict is delicate and requires fine judgement, the use of the ADF in providing aid to the civil power raises even more difficult questions and places an even greater onus on those implementing government policy.

As the questioning of senior departmental officials at Senate Estimates just this week has shown, the moral dimension of public policy is always under scrutiny—even where the government and the opposition more or less agree on the policy parameters. Operation Sovereign Borders and the consequent detention of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru continue to generate a measure of moral uncertainty in both the Australian parliament and the Australian community. The decision of the major denominations to grant sanctuary in their churches is a direct challenge to the current refugee policy.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of the officers and crew who operate the Royal Australian Navy’s patrol vessels find the command ‘turn back the boats’ morally confronting—not just for reasons of Safety Of Life at Sea but also for reasons of the implicit duty of care towards those who are in distress. It’s to their credit that harsh measures do not sit easily. It’s equally to their credit that they carry out the lawful directions of their commanders.

The situation surrounding refugees who have been detained in the offshore detention centres but brought to Australia to undergo medical treatment raises fundamental questions of morality, especially where children are concerned. The effects of long-term detention on children have been well documented since the end of WW2, when so many children were in Displaced Persons camps all over Europe. The issue turns on whether the duty of care Australia has accepted under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which together impose a moral obligation on Australia, is consistent with the way we’re currently exercising our legal right to manage our national borders.

Of course, the law and morality are not always happy companions. The High Court decides the law, and has recently determined that Australia detains people in the offshore facilities lawfully. Governments determine matters of public morality.

And it’s here that public officials do have a role. In framing advice on border management, public officials have a duty to government to advise of moral hazard. The moral issue is not whether the boats are stopped, or whether the business model of people smugglers is broken. The moral issue is whether Australia has fundamental obligations both to the refugees and to its own citizens (who do have a strong moral sense) to display that duty of care that attaches to all people, by virtue of their humanity.

There’s a fundamental logical fallacy at play in the proposition that ‘by detaining people in offshore facilities, we have stopped people from drowning at sea’. It’s the post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that claims that the reason for something is determined by what happens later. There’s also a serious ‘ends justifying means’ trap of the King Herod kind that would end children living in poverty by killing all the children.

Senior departmental officials may huff and puff at Senate Estimates, but the ultimate responsibility for policy rests with the politicians. It may be the case, as Dr Peter Shergold suggested recently, that senior officials across the board are no longer capable of providing frank and fearless advice. It could equally well be argued that governments are no longer capable of asking for it.

The buck stops with government. Successive governments have simply failed to face up to the moral challenges created by a narrowly focused border management policy. Where public policy fails to address the moral dimension, the moral credibility of political decision-makers is destroyed.

The Prime Minister has some work to do here.

Cold calculations: a new ASPI report

A collection of Antarctica imagesToday ASPI released a new report, Cold Calculations: Australia’s Antarctic Challenges, with contributions from a range of Australian experts on Antarctic issues culled from a series of posts here on The Strategist.

It’s a timely report: just prior to the election the Coalition announced that, if elected, they’d develop a 20 year strategic vision for the Antarctic. Their plan would focus on extending Australia’s research and logistics capacity, as well as positioning Hobart as a gateway for Antarctica.

They also promised to extend the airport runway at Hobart. This would allow larger transport planes to fly to Antarctica. Some of the planes that currently fly for the US polar program could possibly fly out of Hobart, rather than Christchurch. Read more

Lessons learned? Australia’s new Customs and Border Protection Reforms

Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare at the ASPI-HP lunchtime seminar in Sydney, 3 July 2013Last week at an ASPI lunch in Sydney, Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare presented reforms to the Customs and Border Protection Service which are intended to fight corruption, modernise its workforce and streamline processes for travellers and businesses. The Blueprint for Reform document contains a five year plan to create a more comprehensive and joined-up approach to guarding Australia’s borders. It introduced various new measures intended to not only increase security but improve the overall passenger and business experience at Australia’s borders. These included:

  • the creation of a strategic border command with authority to coordinate the deployment of people and technology to risks at the borders
  • establishing a National Border Targeting Centre which will eventually to bring together the various agencies under one roof, which it is intended will allow for greater data sharing, and joint planning of operations
  • the introduction of an electronic data reporting system for all goods arriving in and leaving Australia
  • working closer with industry to create trusted partnership schemes to allow quicker goods export and import
  • an expansion of the SmartGates system for travellers from Australia and New Zealand so that they can process themselves at the border, along with an expansion of the scheme to other nationalities holding e-passports—including China, the United States and the United Kingdom.  The plan is for 90% of travelling passengers to use this system by 2020
  • various enhanced training schemes for personnel to create a more dynamic working environment. Read more