Tag Archive for: power

How the Australian public service really works: power

Working in the public service can be a fraught game. Senior public servants doing the nation’s business in Canberra play for high stakes. A service career can consume much—even the career itself.

There’s sharp competition within the public service: both between ambitious individuals keen to gain power, and between departments and agencies. Public servants live close to power, witnessing its uses and abuses. They serve politicians who are constantly counting the costs and chances in career-defining terms.

Politicians are entrepreneurs and risk-takers par excellence. On a daily basis they toss the dice, always hoping to beat the odds. They know, too, that as the British politician Enoch Powell famously said, ‘All political careers, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.’ Even at the peak of their parliamentary careers, many of our leaders are wondering what will happen to them when it all ends.

The theory holds that politicians decide what to do and the public service decides how to do it. That’s true up to a point.

It all depends on power—who has it, and how it is used.

Some political leaders understand power well and use it effectively, for good or for ill. In the United States, President Lyndon B. Johnson had an incredible eye for power. And he knew it. As he said, ‘I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it.’ Robert Caro’s biographical series on LBJ is a truly brilliant study of the use of power.

In Canberra, as in Washington, much depends on understanding power: knowing where to hunt for it, being able to grab or guide it, and knowing when to seize the chance to command and control (and spend).

A disarmingly honest view of how this works is offered by the former Liberal minister Christopher Pyne:

It didn’t really matter what the question was, I just had to be told what side I was on and I would find the arguments for it … I’d always assumed everybody was mesmerised by what was going on in Question Time, and now I’ve discovered that they don’t even know when the Parliament’s sitting …

Those people who said that I liked the game more than the policy misunderstood that the game is to get the power to be able to do the policy … I always wanted to be somebody who had the hands on the levers of power.

Public servants must stand close to this fire; they have to work with it, and sometimes walk through it. Power swirls around all senior officials and sets the parameters for their work. They must be sensitive to it in all its shapes, forms and directions.

Vertical power flows down from above, from the minister and the prime minister. Or if you are a middle-level official, it flows from the secretary of the department.

Horizontal power is what flows all through government—political, financial, legal, administrative, military, coercive and rhetorical. Hard power pushes and commands. Soft power attracts and persuades.

Public servants themselves have several different types of power. It’s worth thinking about what those are because every public servant has to grasp and use them.

Negative power. It’s often quite difficult for public servants to take ownership of initiatives, not least because politicians are generally keen to be seen to be the ones who have the ideas and announce the initiatives. But public servants have a great deal of negative power—that is, the power to delay things, and perhaps eventually bury them.

Most senior public servants value their negative power and use it willingly.

One common manoeuvre is to set up an internal committee (often called a ‘review’) and let the chair know there’s no hurry to come up with a report. Another trick is to set up an interdepartmental committee and make sure that representatives of the departments of Finance and Treasury attend: the people who count the dollars can be counted on to contest anything likely to push up the cost.

Sir Humphrey Appleby, in Yes, Minister, when he was worried about a suggestion from his minister, the Right Honourable James Hacker MP, put it like this:

What I mean is that I’m fully seized of your aims and, of course, will do my utmost to see that they’re put into practice. To that end, I recommend that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we’ll be in a position to think through the various implications and arrive at a decision based on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action which might well have unforeseen repercussions.

Translation: ‘Minister, not only will your idea be dead on arrival, but it will take a long time to arrive.’

Derived power. The game of ‘I’m Closer to the King’ is a common manoeuvre in the modern version of court politics and the dance of the courtiers.

A good deal of the personal power that influential public servants gather to themselves flows down from more senior levels, preferably from the minister or the prime minister. This, in turn, leads to the game of ‘I’m Closer’.

Often, in meetings, one or another of the participants will try to indicate to others in the room that they are closer to the secretary of the department or to the minister, and that their comments should clearly bear more weight.

To be really effective, it is best that players in the ‘I’m Closer’ game rely on references to personal contacts rather to anything on paper. Paper has the disadvantage that it can be verified, even analysed and used in evidence; in playing at court politics a paper trail can be dangerous.

It’s always best to keep things vague. Comments such as, ‘I heard from the minister’s office yesterday that …’, ‘When I was talking to the minister last week …’ and ‘The secretary told me that …’  are all quite effective. And to mention the prime minister is to play an ace.

Tidying-up power. The power to tidy up after government decisions is where public servants can move the pieces and steer the result to such an extent that the decisions are remade.

Writing up the minutes or the announcement is an important control mechanism; actually ‘implementing’ the decision offers all sorts of authority.

Senior public servants will sometimes coyly express the view that one of the most important things they do is ‘follow up on’ the implementation of decisions announced by ministers and governments.

Ministers and governments tend to have Good Ideas and to be eager to announce things. But often the Good Ideas haven’t been carefully considered before the announcements are made.

In the following weeks and months, it may become clear that things are more complicated than they seemed at first. Budgets blow out. Legal complications crop up. One or several of the state governments—which were not consulted on the Good Idea—quietly (or noisily) indicate that they have their own preferred Good Idea. Thus, the announcement of a ministerial idea is merely the first step in a long process.

Public servants will be expected, over the following months and years, to tidy up in the trail of the initial announcement—and often, in the process, introduce considerable changes to the programs.

The tidying-up function is closely related to the operation of nominal and real policy, which will be the next topic in this series.

The Thucydides Trap … or a trap for young players

Sadly, hermeneutics—or exegesis as it was formerly known—is not much in vogue these days. Maybe that reflects the fact that most of us rely on translation for our glimpses into the texts written in ancient (and dead) languages. And the word ‘hermeneutics’ itself needs a bit of exegesis: most understand it as ‘interpretation’, though Aristotle’s Peri Hermēneias actually deals with ‘explanation’.

But if one is to coin a term like ‘Thucydides Trap’, declaring that war between Athens and Sparta was ‘inevitable’, and blame Thucydides for the invention, one should surely check the original text to confirm that ‘inevitability’ is what Thucydides wrote and meant. This is a task that Professor Graham Allison should have undertaken before he pronounced on the contest between Athens and Sparta, and applied it to the more contemporary relationship between China and the United States.

At issue here is how one should translate 1.23.6 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Allison has apparently used Richard Crawley’s translation, originally published in 1874, as edited by Robert Strassler in The Landmark Thucydides. So Allison amplifies Crawley’s ‘The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable’. This is readable and accessible, but not accurate.

Benjamin Jowett, the great English classicist, theologian and friend of Florence Nightingale, proposed this in his 1881 translation: ‘The real though unavowed cause I believe to have been the growth of the Athenian power, which terrified the Lacedaemonians [Spartans] and forced them into war’.

And not to be outdone, Thomas Hobbes suggested in his 1628 translation: ‘And the truest quarrel though least in speech, I conceive to be the growth of Athenian power; which putting the Lacedaemonians into fear, necessitated the war’. Make of that what you will.

So these three translations suggest three quite different conceptions of the relationship between cause and consequence: inevitability, compulsion and necessity.

Thucydides’ original Greek is dense and somewhat idiosyncratic, which leads to considerable variability in translation. The clause on which Professor Allison’s thesis depends is ‘ἀναγκάσαι ἐς τὸ πολεμεῖν’ (Thucydides, Historiae in two volumes, Oxford University Press, 1942).

At the risk of terrifying non-grammarians and non-classicists alike, let’s pull it apart. The first word, anagkasai, is the third person singular number, active voice, optative mood, aorist tense meaning ‘[as it were] constrained’ or ‘[as it were] compelled’. The verb is related to the Greek noun for ‘prison’ (anagkaion). The optative in Greek is tricky, a fact that Professor Allison might have familiarised himself with, since it lends a sense of the hypothetical to the clause. The second word, es, is a stylistic particle that cues the third word, tŏ, which is the singular neuter definite article serving in this case as a definite pronoun—‘it’. This leaves polemein—an infinitive meaning ‘to fight’.

So the most literal translation of the clause? ‘It, as it were, compelled/constrained [them] to fight’. And to what does ‘it’ refer? Earlier in the sentence, Thucydides identifies the increase in Athenian power and its consequence—Sparta’s fear—as the motivating forces for the ensuing war.

In any historical document, context is everything. A close reading of Thucydides’ History reinforces one of the central themes of his work—that people have agency, they make decisions (or not, as the case may be) and are more or less in control of their own destinies. That, in most respects, is the historiographical significance of The History.

That perhaps explains why Thucydides dismisses the popular views of the causes of the war—earthquakes, eclipses, droughts and pestilence—in the immediately preceding sentences of The History. His point is not inevitability or fate: rather, it is human agency. Just as Pericles had maintained the peace before his death, so others instigated war after his death. Pericles, by the way, died of ‘plague’ (probably typhoid fever), though it would be a bold historian who attributed the Peloponnesian War to the salmonella typhi bacterium.

It’s not just a close reading of Thucydides’ original text that debunks Professor Allison’s theory on inevitability. Professor Arthur Waldron makes a good job of it in his review of Professor Allison’s book.

In his own way, Thucydides was a realist who would have been quite at home with Morgenthau and Kissinger. Professor Allison is more of a determinist, ascribing inevitable consequences to a mechanistic appreciation of power imbalance. Power is often unbalanced. The political question is what people decide to do about the imbalance. That’s the point of The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Making strategic policy: what’s involved?

Strategy

With preparations for the 2015 Defence White Paper well underway, I’d like to offer some thoughts about how strategic policy is—ideally—made. I see strategy as the purposeful actions undertaken by an actor within a specific environment with the intention of shaping future outcomes to the actor’s benefit. So making strategic policy means solving a puzzle in three parts: understanding an environment largely not of our own making; determining our own global and regional role; and acknowledging a set of constraints that bound that role.

Let’s start with the environment. We live in a globalised world characterised by power diffusion and strategic dynamism. Weakened global and regional leadership is a likely condition in that world. In part that’s because it takes longer to build winning coalitions when power is diffused, but it’s also because the emerging powers don’t always share the worldview of the more established powers.

One thing interconnectedness hasn’t done—and some thought it would—has been to make hard power obsolete. And because force is still an important variable, strategic analysts continue to be interested in its use—including by agile, non-state actors well poised to exploit globalisation’s empowering features. But interconnectedness has helped to drive a major reformulation of the security agenda, expanding it to include both traditional and non-traditional threats.

Despite that expansion, the most dangerous strategic opponent we might face would still be a revisionist great power. Do revisionist great powers now stalk the earth? The two that attract most attention, Russia and China, seem to be only limited revisionists. But their recent behaviour raises a deep, troubling and as yet unanswered question: how revisionist do they have to be before we need to worry?

Strategic dynamism dominates in Asia. Major powers—with little history of strategic cooperation at the top-tier and second-tier levels—are engaged in both a spatial and a positional competition for influence. Nationalism underpins that competition and cuts away at the internationalist ethic required to strengthen the key pillars of the regional order. A saving grace is that, despite Xi Jinping’s talk of ‘Asia for the Asians’, the region’s fastest-rising great power, China, doesn’t yet retail a narrative of a different regional order.

Let’s turn to the second part of the puzzle: Australia as actor. In theory, this is the ‘middle bit’ of any Defence White Paper, holding together how we see the world and the capabilities we plan to use to defend against perceived threats. But in a grander sense it asks us about Australia’s optimal ‘design’ for the world, because that design gives meaning and purpose to our strategic policy.

As a country, we are what we are: an arid island continent, not situated along the strategically important Eurasian rimlands but at some distance from them. We have a large continent, a small population and an economy dominated by the mining, farming and service sectors. How do we see our own role in the world? In the broadest sense, Australian grand strategy hasn’t changed since white settlement. We were born into a world of Western advantage, and our strategy has been to seek a secure Australia within a stable, liberal, prosperous global order. That order endures. So I don’t believe we’re engaged in a search for a new grand strategy. Rather, we seek a way to achieve our traditional objective in the 21st century.

Still, in recent years Australian strategy has been marked by debate rather than consensus. Defence and security issues are typically seen as points of bipartisan agreement in Australian politics. That’s true—until it’s not. The flurry of official declaratory policy since the White Paper in 2000—Defence Updates in 2003, 2005 and 2007, Defence White Papers in 2009 and 2013, amongst other documents—suggests that bipartisanship mightn’t be as strong as some believe.

Different White Papers have placed different emphases upon different ‘Australias’. The 2009 paper, for example, stressed Australia’s role as a muscular, self-reliant power, reluctant to seek assistance from its ally unless it were to find itself entangled in a conflict with a great power. The 2013 paper placed more stress on our role as an order-builder, and saw strategy as an ‘upstream’ political activity and not just a ‘downstream’ military response. Each White Paper in turn invited criticism from those who believed that it portrayed not merely the environment, but Australia’s strategic identity, incorrectly.

Finally, let’s turn to the third part of the puzzle: the constraints. In reality, many things constrain us, but here I want to talk about four factors in particular. Each holds us ‘prisoner’ by limiting our freedom to act in the world. The first factor is our declaratory settings, which make us a prisoner of our own mouth. Second is solvency, which makes us a prisoner of our wallet. Third is the need for public support for a strategic policy, which makes us a prisoner of our political system. And the fourth factor is capacity, which makes us a prisoner of our existing capabilities. This is the area where the rubber meets the road, where strategic policy ideas press up against the defined priorities, the affordable, the sellable and the doable.

In the three parts of the puzzle lie the core of all the current contests in Australian strategic policy. The environment is complex and transformational, we’re arguing among ourselves about the sort of purposeful actions and outcomes that would best suit our interests, and the constraints seem to press in upon us from all sides.

The 2015 Defence White Paper has much ground to cover.