Serious and organised crime: getting Australia’s top-level governance right

ASPI is examining how the Commonwealth government could bolster its contribution in the national fight against serious and organised crime. In addition to a proposal to build nation-wide capability, research for this paper has also identified ministerial arrangements as a critical enabler of the fight.

The Commonwealth, States and Territories share responsibilities for organised crime, which makes an effective governance structure at the national level essential. With the federal police, all state police forces and other agencies at both levels of government having dogs in the fight, the structure has to be a pretty flexible one.

The incoming Abbott Government promised to reform the current inter-jurisdictional ministerial arrangements in the legal and law enforcement space. Under the present Council of Australian Governments (COAG) framework there are two subgroups representing distinct sets of actors in the fight. The first group, which dates back to the 1960s, represents the law officers, through the Standing Council on Law and Justice (SCLJ). The other, the Standing Council on Police and Emergency Management (SCPEM), is a 1980s construct and represents the law enforcers. Read more

Herding cats: the US rebalance

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on October 10, 2013.Ask any specialist on Asian security to describe the strategic policies of China’s neighbours and you’re more likely than not to hear the word ‘hedging’ in the reply. As they become increasingly integrated with the Chinese economy, most of the countries of Eastern Asia have developed progressively strong defence linkages with the United States, and apparently each other.

Indeed, much of the logic of Washington’s ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalancing’ strategy (depending on whom you’re talking to) seems to be predicated on Asian hedging. The United States, so the logic of the pivot goes, can use enhanced defence relationships in the western Pacific to bolster the predominance of its alliance system at a time of constrained defence spending, precisely because of the wariness of Pacific Asia about China’s growing clout.

It’s a logic that international relations theory would endorse. Alliance theorists from Waltz to Walt tell us that a growing threat will be met with ever greater solidarity among those it threatens. Read more

Indonesia and the next defence white paper

Marty Natalegawa, Indonesia's Minister of Foreign AffairsThe Abbott government has promised to write a new Defence White Paper within 18 months, and one of the key challenges it will face is considering the place of Indonesia in Australian defence thinking. As the fear of a direct Indonesian threat retreats into the past, it is being replaced by a view of Indonesia as a potential ‘buffer’ separating Australia from the vagaries of the East Asian system. But when the new government considers Australia’s defence options in the next century, it’d do well to remember that Indonesia gets a vote in the role it plays in defending Australia.

Historically, Indonesia has comprised an important, though unclear, element in Australia’s strategic environment. When Australia looks at its neighbourhood in isolation, Indonesia’s proximity and strategic potential makes it appear as a liability. But if the lens is widened to encompass the entire Asia-Pacific strategic system, a strong Indonesia looks more like an asset. During the Cold War Australia’s security concerns about Indonesia revolved around threats associated with Konfrontasi, communism and state collapse, with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Sukarno regime menacing briefly in 1965. But as early as the 1970s, Defence was also conducting studies of possible regional contingencies which involved Indonesia as an ally in achieving regional security. So recognition of our mutual strategic interests coexisted with security concerns about Indonesia. Read more

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

A wombat free zone in Trade

wombat As noted in my previous column on the changes the Abbott government is making to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the wombat tribe has lost ownership of Trade. That’s to say, the National Party has given away or been deprived of the right to the Trade Minister job when the Coalition’s in office.

This column returns to the wombats because when an unwritten law of federal politics is repealed after nearly seven decades, it’s worthy of note. From 1956, when the Coalition was in power, the wombat tribe (the junior coalition partner Country-turned-National Party) always got Trade—and it was usually the ministry of choice for the leader of the Country/National Party. Australians became accustomed to the idea that the deputy Prime Minister would also be the Trade Minister.

The law was created by John McEwan, who held Trade for 15 years. It says much for McEwan’s impact on the culture of the wombats that his iron grip on Trade persisted as party tradition, long after McEwan’s protectionist ethos had expired. Read more

ASPI suggests

This week the bare minimum of sanity has prevailed in Washington, with the GOP blinking at the last minute on the US shutdown. Further government borrowing will be allowed, and those closed parts of the government will reopen; all that in exchange for future budget negotiations. “We fought the good fight” House Republican leader John Boehner said, “we just didn’t win.” The NYT have also continued to update their flow chart of the crisis for those interested in the blow-by-blow. The Economist says that the US is even worse than Europe.

National Bureau of Asian Research has published the most recent volume in the Strategic Asia series, Asia in the Second Nuclear Age which examines the nuclear weapons programs in all the major Asian states, both established nuclear powers and those which possess high degrees of nuclear latency. Ashley Tellis’ introductory chapter (PDF) examines current Asian nuclear weapons programs in the context of America’s efforts at pursuing nuclear abolition. Read more

(more) Reader responses: Australia as a pivotal power

Anthony Bergin’s recent post Is Australia a pivotal power?  has sparked a lot of responses. Below are the latest submissions. We’re also happy to hear from readers who aren’t named Andrew.

It’s only words

Andrew Davies

In the proud tradition of ASPI not having a house view on issues, I feel compelled to buy into the ‘pivotal power’ discussion kicked off here by Anthony Bergin. Thanks to Damien Kingsbury, I now know that ‘pivotal’ is an adjective that already has its own associated meaning in these matters. But ultimately I subscribe to the Humpty Dumpty school of thought; words mean what we want them to mean. So really I don’t think it matters how we characterise ourselves. What matters, as Carl Ungerer pointed out yesterday, is how successful we are in shaping our foreign policy to achieve outcomes that support our national interests.

But I’m rather taken by Damien’s suggested ‘thought experiment’ of imagining what would happen if Australia was to disappear—that’s a very neat way of structuring the exercise of evaluating Australia’s influence. And it serves the purpose of quickly illuminating where our real influence lies. Read more

A folly of strategic proportions

The Wonderful Barn, a famine folly built in 1743 on the Castletown House Estate in County Kildare, Ireland. With a new government taking charge, the proposal to build a fourth Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD) has re-emerged. Unsurprisingly, the loudest voices are those with a vested interest, including shipbuilders and shipyard unions. So far, the public debate has focused on avoiding a shipbuilding ‘valley of death’ when the last AWD is delivered in 2019—without any serious discussion of whether a fourth AWD is a worthwhile investment. Much like the often-whimsical famine follies build around the time of the Irish Potato Famine, the goal seems to be to keep people in work irrespective of the intrinsic merit of the project.

When complete, the three Hobart-class AWDs currently in build will reinstate the broad area air defence capability lost when the last of the Navy’s DDG destroyers was decommissioned in 2001. At the risk of undermining the supposed analytic rigour of Defence’s force planning processes, the most likely reason we are building three AWDs is that we once had three DDGs. So it’s fair to ask what a fourth vessel would give us.

Hugh White has long argued that the utility of surface combatant has been eclipsed by anti-shipping missile technology, and Andrew Davies has questioned the protection of shipping argument often used to justify the AWD program. I have sympathy with both views, but let’s stipulate for argument’s sake that AWD are useful things.

All other things being equal, more capability is better than less. A fourth AWD would give us 33% more capability than a fleet of three. Given an effective and well-managed sustainment arrangement (which admittedly can’t be taken for granted given recent experience with other fleets), it would effectively assure the continuous availability of at least 2 ships and would make 3 ships available most of the time. While this would be a good thing, it would come at a cost.

Every dollar spent on a fourth AWD can’t be spent on other capability options. For example, why not expand the planned fleet of LHD amphibious vessels from two to three rather than increase the AWD fleet from three to four? A 50% increase to the LHD fleet might well be better than a 33% increase to the AWD fleet. As things stand, there’ll be extended periods when only one amphibious ship is available for tasking. But with the lion’s share of the amphibious ships being built in Spain rather than Australia, don’t hold your breath waiting for someone to make the case.

My point isn’t that we should build a third LHD. Rather, it’s an example of how a multi-billion dollar investment such as an extra AWD should be carefully considered in terms of the opportunity cost it imposes on potentially more cost-effective alternatives.

The ambitions surrounding a fourth AWD go beyond boosting the capacity of the currently planned fleet. It’s been put to me on several occasions that a fourth AWD provides a perfect opportunity for Australia to develop a Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) capability by fitting the final vessel with the Aegis BMD system employing the SM-3 missile. While a single such vessel would inevitably be unavailable some of the time due to maintenance, it would allow Australia to ‘get into the game’ of BMD alongside the United States and Japan.

Given that the Aegis BMD system is only designed to intercept short to intermediate range ballistic missile threats, the argument for acquiring a naval BMD capability would most likely be based on protecting deployed Australian troops. Let’s hope our troops remain close to the beach, so that the intermittently available BMD-equipped AWD can be brought into an intercept position relative to the threat. Or, better still, let’s acquire the ground-based Patriot PAC-3 system, so that our troops have a measure of protection wherever they go. Of course, if we were really serious about BMD for deployed troops we’d want the PAC-3 system in any case, to create the layered protection intrinsic to an effective system even if geography allowed an Aegis BMD component to come into play.

To be honest, I don’t think that there’s a high priority for either a sea-based or ground-based BMD capability to protect deployed troops. If such a capability was halfway worthy of consideration it would’ve been seriously developed years ago. Instead, we’ve made do with a short-range air defence system employing the shoulder-launched RBS 70, which has zero capability against ballistic missiles and only a very limited capability against fast moving aircraft. Moreover, the latest Defence Capability Plan contains no projects to either improve our ground-based air defences or establish ground-based missile defences.

Of course, a fourth AWD with Aegis BMD would be a valuable contribution to a US-led coalition mission in North Asia—it’s no accident that Japan is the only country apart from the United States to have the system. But do we really want to structure our forces for fighting in North Asia? For a long time our strategy has been to use assets acquired for our own defence as the basis of contributions to coalition missions. What message would we send by changing course and explicitly developing capabilities for the sole purpose of fighting in North Asia?

Those points are open to further debate, and they have pros and cons in terms of capability and military options the ADF can provide to government. But so far, none of these issues have so much as seen the light of day in the debate over a fourth AWD. Instead, we’re being asked to spend something in excess of $2 billion in order to avoid the ‘valley of death’ between the end of the AWD program in 2019 and the commencement of the new submarine and/or Anzac frigate replacement program. But we don’t have a start date for either program, and a life-of-type extension looks to be on the cards for at least the submarines.  As for the Anzacs, which are presently undergoing a major anti-shipping missile defence upgrade, a life-of-type extension warrants close examination to determine the most cost-effective way ahead—even if it’s not the preferred option of industry or Navy. Until plans firm up on the future frigate and submarine fronts, we don’t even know if a fourth AWD would be sufficient to close the gap in shipyard work.

More importantly, even if we had strong confidence that a fourth vessel would enable continuity of production, there’s no indication that the scale of savings would justify the additional cost of a fourth vessel. A recent paper from ASC Ltd says only around 20% of the cost of a warship is due to shipyard labour, which means that only 20% of the cost of producing a vessel can be impacted by the ‘learning curve’ and skills maintenance that continuity of production promises to deliver. So, even if continuity generated a 30% reduction in labour costs (being very generous), the resulting saving would only be a 30% x 20% = 6% reduction in cost of the initial replacement frigates. And for this we’re asked to build an entire extra vessel and then crew and support it throughout its decades of service.

In the absence of either a clear strategic rationale or plausible business case, a fourth AWD would be a folly of strategic proportions.

Mark Thomson is senior analyst for defence economics at ASPI. Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.

Correction: an earlier version of this post linked to the potato famine of the 1840s rather than the earlier famine during which the folly in the illustration was built. The error was by the contributor.

Reader response: size, the elusive variable

Ramesh Thakur once said that size is an elusive variable. So I commend Anthony Bergin for re-opening the debate about Australia’s middle power status and position on the world stage.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the ‘middle power’ label has waxed and waned in Australian foreign policy discussions for over 60 years. But this is still a debate worth having, because although the academic world has largely moved on from talking about middle powers in the international system, countries such as South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey and Mexico are now engaged actively in discussions about how second-tier states can and should respond to the shifts in global power relativities.

And there are new steps being taken to formalise the role of the middle powers in international forums. For Anthony, the establishment of the MITKA grouping in the margins of the UN General Assembly as a coordinating mechanism for middle powers undersells Australia’s key economic and political strengths and therefore diminishes our potential diplomatic clout as a more significant ‘pivotal’ power. Read more

Reader response: Australia is more and less than a middle power

Punching above our weight - kangaroo boxingAnthony Bergin is surely right when he channels his inner Alexander Downer to make the case that Australia is more (but also, I think, sometimes less) than a middle power in international affairs. Any real estate agent can tell you why: location, location, location. As the regional hegemon across a huge but underpopulated oceanic expanse at the fringes of Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans, Australia is the superpower of a region that most of the world never thinks about.

 But in some ways we are less than a middle power too. The well-worn foreign affairs boilerplates of Australia being a “clear-eyed” power that “punches above its weight” are of diminishing utility. Yes we are a generous aid spender and a good international citizen, but we sometimes use those qualities to avoid rather than embrace the challenges of leadership. On the tough issues that matter—such as making contributions commensurate with our interests to global public goods like freedom of the high seas or addressing climate change—we often prefer to free-ride rather than lead. Read more