Guest editor Anthony Bergin

If I were an Australian scientist excited by the prospect of novelty in Antarctic-derived organic material or processes, I might have a tough time getting there, collecting my samples and bringing them back into Australia for processing. But the restrictions wouldn’t be insurmountable. Antarctic biota and processes aren’t especially protected from the science of biological prospecting. Scientists are virtually given ‘free’ access to prospect for the purposes of scientific research, provided they play by the rules.

The rules are few and relatively simple. The government runs an Australian Antarctic Science Program that I can apply to for support. I don’t need to be a government scientist; I can work in a university, for example, which may or may not have an affiliation with an end user such as a pharmaceutical company. If I were clever enough to win a grant, I’d have access to a berth on a ship or a seat on a plane going south. I’d have a bunk at a station and be able to roam the environs in search of my soil/water/organism sample. Then I’d bring my sample material back to my laboratory in Australia, in compliance with the quarantine rules, and start the gruelling process of looking for something novel that might have a commercial application. Read more

Jim Molan’s polemical article in Quadrant (March 2013) (and his précis on The Strategist last week) presents a target-rich environment. Putting aside what I’ll describe as Jim’s robust style of argument, he addresses the two key perennial policy questions for Defence: how much to invest and what to do with the investment.

His main proposition seems to be that good strategy leads Australia being capable of engaging in ‘high-end warfighting’ in so-called Wars of Necessity. ‘That is why we build the ADF’, he says. So what’s his justification for this level of capability?

At one level, Jim seems believe we should invest just so that the ADF ‘can conduct a level of sophisticated joint warfighting operations appropriate to a nation such as Australia’—whatever ‘appropriate’ means in this context! To be fair, however, the appeal to national pride and institutional vanity is not the only or the primary argument offered in the article. Read more

Australia is now well into its third month on the United Nations Security Council. Nothing is more fundamental to the wellbeing of societies than security, and the Security Council carries the greatest responsibility for human wellbeing of all international bodies. It is the Security Council that holds the legitimate authority to act when populations are threatened with genocide, mass killings and widespread violations of human rights. Australia’s two-year term on the Security Council is an opportunity for it to make a real contribution to significant security issues affecting populations all over the world. Australia now holds a position of huge moral responsibility, so what does Australia hope to achieve during its time on the Security Council?

The Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, argues that ‘middle powers’ have been able to achieve great advances for human wellbeing when they have focused on specific issues. In the limited time that it has on the Security Council, Australia should choose specific security issues on which to focus and champion. But, how does Australia choose from among the many global security woes? Read more

The tenth anniversary of the Iraq war is an opportune moment for the Canberra system to contemplate the need to strengthen its traditions and foster some more robust conventions. Ten years on, emotion remains high and the politics is still noxious, but there has been time enough to look clearly at how Australia went to war in 2003.

In serving that aim, this column—the first of two—looks at what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated about the demands and questions the Parliament can mount once war is declared: the emerging conventions that need to be enhanced. The next column will return to the role the public service played in the debate and preparation that preceded the Iraq war, pondering how the bureaucracy failed to honour its own traditions.

Three previous columns laid out the ground for this discussion of tradition and convention. The first was on how the Australian political process did its job in the Iraq war while the rest of Canberra system fell silent (a point Derek Woolner expanded on), the second discussed the Prime Minister’s most profound prerogative: the right to declare war and the third looked at the many parallels between Australia’s entry to Vietnam and Iraq. Read more

If we learn more from losses than wins, then the Canberra system has much to gain from examining its lousy performance in the processes that took Australia to war in Vietnam and Iraq. For Australia, both wars were all about the alliance with the United States. Both were wars of choice, although the regional implications Canberra read into Vietnam meant it was closer to a war of necessity than Iraq.

Both wars exemplify the Prime Minister’s most profound prerogative and Parliament’s lack of power. The entry to both showed the Canberra system performing below its best, revealing again the truth that artifice and farce often attend the most serious of moments of government.

In announcing the deployment to Vietnam, the farce was the last minute rush to extract a formal request from the government of South Vietnam, to veil the patent reality that this was a response to US needs. In the case of Iraq, the artifice was the Howard Government’s claim through 2002 and early 2003 that it was still to make up its mind about whether or not to go to war—a thin veil over the patent reality that this was all about the alliance and that Australia was deeply committed to US invasion plans.

A quickly mocked-up invitation to Vietnam and a false will-we-won’t-we facade on the approach to Iraq… Q: Why are voters so cynical and dismissive about the noble and historic efforts of their leaders to shape and direct history? A: History. Read more