security
29 Apr 2008
Howard's Foreign Policy Legacy
Thanks to Fiona Katauskas
National security hard-hats still have the ear of Government, fears Tony Kevin
In her Freilich Foundation lectures in 2005, Carmen Lawrence argued that fear was a crucial factor in shaping Australian public policy under the Howard government. A recent book of specialist essays on foreign policy edited by Carl Ungerer, Australian Foreign Policy in the Age of Terror, illustrates her argument. The authors claim that "after 9/11, terrorism became a central and defining issue in Australia's domestic policies and foreign relations" (my italics).This collection of essays asks whether 9/11 and the ensuing 'War on Terror' "forced Australians to re-examine traditional assumptions about the use of force in the international system, the role of alliances, the importance of religion, and at the broadest level, Australia's place and position in the world."
My answer is no. John Howard's fearful "us and them" world, of selected bilateral friends and general threats, is now becoming a bad 12-year long memory. It takes an effort of imagination now to project ourselves back into that strange world. With Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, there is reason to hope that the Australian Government's perception of the international agenda is changing in more expansive, less fearful directions. Rudd's recent world tour put real runs on the board. To be a good international citizen and actively committed UN member has returned as a major aim of Australian foreign policy.
But are sections of the Australian foreign policy and national security bureaucracies still living, by force of habit, in a world mainly defined by fear? How much of the worldview so well analysed in Lawrence's lectures still lingers in Canberra? And do Labor Ministers have any idea how to re-jig their departmental executives' way of thinking towards the new direction Rudd is taking as Prime Minister?
It's a little like turning the Titanic around. If there is not a great deal of deliberate hard steering from the bridge, the ship will stay comfortably on its old course.
Take, for example, a recent speech by the Minister for Immigration, Senator Chris Evans. In an otherwise humanitarian speech, sensitive to the human rights of persons caught up in migration and refugee determination issues, he said this on border security:
"The Government is committed to strong border security, tough anti-people smuggling measures and the orderly processing of migration to our country... This Government will continue to look at ways to prevent, deter and enforce compliance to preserve the integrity of Australia's migration program, while treating individuals humanely."
Did Evans really understand what he was saying, or did he just uncritically accept a departmental draft? Does he understand that under Howard, terms like "strong border security" and "tough anti-people-smuggling measures" were policy cover under which the AFP and Immigration mounted questionable covert people smuggling disruption operations in Indonesia? Under which Defence intercepted boats and was in no hurry to rescue people at risk of drowning on crippled, sinking vessels?
It is easy to list the departments in which old national security thinking still prevails: Attorney-General's (overseeing ASIO and the AFP), Defence, DFAT, and Immigration. Consider the way the Haneef and Hicks cases are being dragged out in the Attorney-General's Department. Consider the prism of "terrorism" through which security issues in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines are still being seen - when the truth is that these are primarily local, inter-communal problems.
To confront the book's gravest error: the most profound shock to Australian foreign policy was not 9/11, but our change of government five years earlier, which made multilateralism, good international citizenship and UN obligations "out" and bilateralism, assertive coalitions of the willing, and a more proactive approach to the US alliance "in". Foreign policy was to be hard-headed, about national interest and power. Security agencies were to play a much bigger role, and DFAT quickly had to learn to talk their language. The AFP became an active arm of foreign policy, on issues that the AFP would itself choose to be engaged: joint operations with South East Asian police forces on counterterrorism, drug-trafficking and people smuggling; and restoring civil order in the Solomon Islands.
By September 2001, this new way of doing Australian foreign policy was already well entrenched. Tampa, Defence's Operation Relex, the AFP/Department of Immigration people-smuggling disruption program, and the Pacific Solution, all had a national security focus. And Australia's anti-UN rhetoric, singing from Washington's songbook, was underway well before 9/11.
Increasingly, Australian police and soldiers are doing the kind of work abroad that diplomats used to do. And our diplomats' opportunities to make a real policy difference as diplomats seem to be shrinking.
DFAT's top diplomats like Nick Warner, who went from being the political face of the Solomons operation to Secretary of Defence, now build careers as interchangeable national security generalists - another Howard legacy. But at the end of the day, will we still have top-class career diplomats? Does Prime Minister Rudd want to turn the new orthodoxy around, to restore the kind of capable and often inspired professional foreign policy style that Australia enjoyed before 1996? Or have he and his ministers become so used to national security agencies' dominance of Australia's foreign policy, that they can't see how stultifying narrow and vision-limiting it is?
These questions are still unanswered. On border security, the war in Afghanistan, Defence strategic doctrine, regional and domestic counter-terrorism, South Pacific pol-mil interventionism, we still inhabit the politics of fear. It seems odd that while we are still in so many ways living in that world, Rudd seriously thinks we could be elected to a seat in the UN Security Council in 2012. He will be pushing uphill, I fear, unless he can bring about real cultural change at home.
Nor will it be easy to restore an open foreign policy public debate in Australia, in which liberal multilateralists and national security hard-hats could talk to one another again. Sadly, we operate now in ideologically defined intellectual silos. There is one kind of foreign policy debate that happens in places like newmatilda.com, Eureka Street, and in a recent foreign policy colloquium at Manning Clark House in Canberra; and another kind that happens in national security institutes and think-tanks. And I fear that the latter still has the ear of government, and the money that goes with it, far more than the former.
As a great crime of mass murder and a symbol of man's inhumanity to man, 9/11 was truly shocking. But while pursuing those responsible as major criminals, we also need to open dialogue with ideological enemies, try to understand and redress their political grievances. September 11 did not come out of a historical vacuum, as any reader of Robert Fisk's writings on the Middle East knows.
Many of us are not persuaded by Huntington's "clash of civilisations" thesis. The lesson in Northern Ireland was that IRA and Ulster Defence Force terror were best addressed as criminal law enforcement matters, and the underlying adversarial politics by patient multi-faceted diplomacy. It worked.
If Australian foreign policy can move towards recognising common humanity, not taking Christian-Islamic hostility as an unchangeable given, we can help make the world a better place.
It is still true, as Lawrence argued in 2005, that human betterment - not a War on Terror - should be a prime focus of Australian foreign policy. Can the Rudd Government start to make this shift, or will we continue wandering like lost souls through John Howard's bleak national security wastelands?
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As I have said before, unless and until Rudd gets rid of legions of Howard era Public Service appointments, there will be no real change in direction. The whole of the Foreign Affairs Dept. should be ‘disposed of’ and replaced en masse. It is absolutely corrupted, and no change at the top can repair that mob. Department heads have always proved very able to ‘take over’ new Ministers, and ensure that they follow the Departmental line, remember Paul Keating in Treasury.
I am just not really sure that Rudd and Co. have any intention of breaking from the Howard line. This is the ‘me-too’ Labour, just as Right Wing as Howard’s Mob of thugs. They seem very comfortable with continuing with far too many Howard policies.
Dazza.
Keep up the scrutiny Tony: your throw away comment on crikey.com.au ‘Your say’ regarding representative nature (and not) of the 2020 Summit security group was very significant and revealing. It was a thread of experience adding to my own re sustainability, and others in their area. This all created a picture which then actually was a foundation of big media scrutiny not so much week prior or during but cranking up seriously by 3-5 days after.
This scrutiny above on Howard regime does indeed travel over to the Rudd ALP machine as just as important for dynamic democracy and best outcomes in policy.
Bravo Tony Kevin, also 5th estate leadership, and yes gutsy sectors of 4th estate.
Also enjoyed your ABC Conversation Hour interview with Richard Fidler regarding the pilgrimage in Spain, not least the purging (change of liquid diet methinks).
Unless I entirely misconstrue, and I think that the Titanic analogy securely underpins my understanding, Tony Kevin sees the Rudd Government as less reliant on fear and is more guided by pro-human values; however, the security executives are still in post 9/11 mode.
Tom appears to make a similar interpretation of the article.
I have seen no evidence on the factory floor to support this outlook, but most certainly the mission statements are much nicer and they no doubt bring righteous smiles to all ALP branch barbeques. This is a government of speeches, gestures and, it seems to me, plastic tokens.
I’m more inclined to observe ministerial behaviour at the coalface. And there have been opportunities for Rudd to launch real substance. For example, Mike Wran’s profoundly cynical statement that David Hicks was guilty because he confessed, is about as low as it is possible to go on human rights. Who would not confess, to escape six years of maltreatment and torture in Guantanamo? If Rudd were a man of humanity and principle, Wran would have been censured and Hicks would have received an immediate pardon; especially as he did nothing that Ernest Hemingway did not do, along with all the other acknowledged hero volunteers that fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil war. That Hick’s objectives were defense of Palestine and Kosovo are largely academic.
The prosecutor’s recent reinforcement of what most Australians had already concluded; that Hicks was but a victim of dirty politics, should have sparked immediate action. Rudd has revealed himself to be just as pragmatic as Howard, and certainly no champion of humanity or justice.
We see the same denial in respect of Israel’s globally-condemned and brutal occupation of Palestine; of the Javanese colonial expansionism that annexed West Papua; of rapacious mining interests that continue to cultivate corruption in PNG.
What I see is a new crew on the same Titanic; same course and same unpleasant destination.
But what concerns me more is the continued claims that this is all democracy. It most certainly is not. It cannot possibly be government of the people, by the people, for the people, if the majority of Australians do not support these policies. And my surveys show that this is generally the case; as do other media-independent polls.
Australian foreign policy, indeed all policies, will not be pro-human and pro-justice until policy derives from the people. The 1967 referendum demonstrated how easy this is to achieve when the issue is promoted by the people themselves, and not from above.