Tag Archive for: Indo-Pacific election pulse 2019

The return of values: Morrison’s strategic policy agenda

Scott Morrison is now generating a clear foreign and defence policy direction for his time as prime minister and working closely with key cabinet ministers to achieve it. The emerging agenda seems to be as much Morrison’s personal creation as it is a product of cabinet government policymaking.

And at the heart of this policy agenda is something that has been mostly absent in Australian strategic thinking and international relationship management for some years—values.

As the prime minister put it earlier this month when standing on the flight deck of the American aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan:

Australia believes in what Ronald Reagan called the ‘truths and traditions’ that define the United States. We stand together in these self-evident truths. We stand together for personal liberty and freedom. For democracy and the ballot box. For the rule of law, and freedom of association. For free economies and free peoples.

Morrison then quoted from remarks Reagan made at a White House state dinner to honour Malcolm Fraser in 1981: ‘We both recognise the responsibility of freedom and are prepared to shoulder it squarely.’

At other times, Australian political leaders have come over misty-eyed talking about shared values with Americans, but they’ve done so when times were good and the recitation didn’t seem to matter all that much. And values have routinely got a guernsey in various government policy statements, like the 2017 foreign policy white paper, but haven’t seemed particularly operative in what our officials and diplomats then do.

The context has changed and with it the pointedness and power of the words. Because now these words read as a statement of intent in the face of other powers that do not believe in these ‘truths’, and act accordingly—the two most notable of which are the Chinese state and the Russian state under presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

The words jar with the reality of Chinese authorities’ exercise of power domestically against their own citizens—in Xinjiang, in Wuhan and in Hong Kong—and with the Chinese military’s annexation of disputed territory in the South China Sea in the face of claims by states like the Philippines and Vietnam. The rule-of-law emphasis contrasts bluntly with the Chinese party-state’s use of law as a weapon against foreigners from states that have made it unhappy and against its own citizens to protect party rule.

While it may jar with Chinese state actions, the statement of what Australia stands for aligns very well with the Morrison agenda in the Pacific and with the steps taken at home by both the Turnbull and Morrison governments. This makes for consistency in international and domestic policy because of parallels between deepening international partnerships with ‘like-mindeds’ and moves to enhance national cohesion.

Domestically, the laws put in place to prevent ‘foreign influence activities that are in any way covert, coercive or corrupt’ from undermining Australian institutions, policymaking and democracy are all about ensuring Australia continues to protect and reinforce these values at home. Similarly, calling out cyber intrusions into the heart of Australian democracy and theft of intellectual property by the Chinese Ministry of State Security is about resisting efforts to subvert our politics and undercut our economy.

And Morrison’s Pacific step-up has a theme of helping our Pacific partners do the same, to enable their own sovereign decision-making. The prime minister’s three big elements of Australia’s renewed engagement with our Pacific family—‘to work with our Pacific Islands partners to build a Pacific region that is secure strategically, stable economically and sovereign politically’—echo the ideas of rule of law, free economies and free peoples.

Lowy Institute polling shows that many Australians no longer trust ‘China’ (more accurately, Xi’s government) to act responsibly in the world, no doubt because of growing knowledge in our community of Chinese interference in political parties, cyber intrusions, punitive trade measures and growing presence in our near region. The very different values that the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party uses to guide its policies and actions are the root cause here.

This view from the Australian community is good news because it tells our leaders that we support—and want—a defence of basic values and freedoms. As John Fitzgerald has noted in a forthcoming publication, it provides a timely reminder to a democratic government that values are anchored not in foreign policy documents, but in civic life. Morrison seems to understand this implicitly and to realise that acting on this impulse is a source of political power.

This contradicts a heavy stream of strategic and international policy and commentary that has bled into the public debate, which seeks to portray nation-states as interchangeable ‘powers’ and the acme of excellence in statecraft and political leadership as the ability to solve the algorithms of changing power balances and adjust the state’s policies and actions accordingly.

That approach seems well represented in Hugh White’s latest book, How to defend Australia, and is probably most familiar to historians of European balance-of-power politics at the time of Bismarck. In this world, the nature of states seems to not matter much. It’s all about the power equation.

This idea leads to the equivalence of living under US or Chinese power and is also quite popular for uncritical advocates of deeper engagement with China despite the realities of authoritarian power.

Maybe it’s odd to a dry strategic mind contemplating 1800s Europe, but values matter because they can increase or detract from a nation-state’s national power. The values a state practices domestically and internationally matter in quite practical ways—because they affect the extent to which that state is trusted, supported, partnered with and even allied with.

Peter Varghese put this clearly recently when speaking about the nature of the Chinese state: ‘For Australia, a democratic China becoming the predominant power in the Indo-Pacific is a very different proposition to an authoritarian China occupying this position.’ It’s a very different proposition because the values of authoritarian China are in stark contrast with Australian values.

Even the Cold War was as much a competition about values as it was about naked national power. And the values of personal liberty and freedom, democracy, the rule of law, freedom of association, free economies and free peoples won.

Maybe the values concept comes easily to Morrison because he’s centred in his own personal (including religious) values. It does seem that this is one of his easy connections with Pacific leaders and audiences.

Beyond Morrison, at least one senior cabinet minister is also signalling a return of values to the core of Australian foreign and defence policy. Linda Reynolds has been using her early speeches, like her July address in the UK, to connect Australia’s defence partnerships to the Morrison agenda. It’s also the way the minister is taking up the theme of ‘political warfare’ sketched out by Australian Defence Force chief Angus Campbell.

Reynolds speaks of the importance of ‘sovereign rights, and the concept that nations of all sizes in every corner of the globe have the right to conduct their affairs free from coercion’. These rights and freedoms are being undermined ‘in very direct ways, contesting our values’ with brazen challenges, ‘whether in the Gulf or the South China Sea, in eastern Ukraine or Salisbury’.

Even more pointedly, some states are using grey-zone tactics, operating ‘just below the threshold of traditional armed conflict’. They are ‘prepared to flout the rules-based order in resorting to these options’.

‘The longer we leave it unchecked, the bolder they become. Australia has been prepared to call out violations of international law and international security and hold those responsible to account. More voices need to join this chorus’, Reynolds says.

The most intriguing thing in all of this is what policy directions and decisions will be most driven by this renewed focus on values.

National security policy is my big pick here, because it’s where the contest of values with authoritarian powers is most intense and where Australia and our allies and partners have a strong competitive advantage, although it’s one that until recently we seem to have discounted.

And it’s where the opportunities from closer partnerships—security and economic—with like-minded states are real. As we are likely to see when Morrison goes to Washington.

Modi: the man, the moment, the media

The overwhelming victory of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, in India’s elections was even more resounding than expected. The medium-term political and social actions are predictable; the long-term consequences are not.

The BJP and its four allies in the National Democratic Alliance look like improving their result in 2014 and winning more than 350 seats in the Lok Sabha and as much as 40% of the vote. They have swept the north and west of the country, captured most of the state of Karnataka in the south, dominated the far-flung northeast and made inroads for the first time into West Bengal, once a communist bastion.

The re-election of a party with a majority in its own right for the first time since 1984 is the result of three interrelated factors: the ‘Modi story’, an ideologically driven organisation, and the media tsunami of the past 30 years.

Let’s begin with the Modi story. The first time the name Narendra Modi appeared in the Times of India, as far as I can discover, was on 23 May 1978 when he was listed as a participant in a discussion about ‘the youth struggle during the emergency’ on a television program called Yuvadarshan (‘Youth vision’). Part of the Modi story is that he was a daring young underground organiser during Indira Gandhi’s cooked-up ‘emergency’ and period of authoritarian rule from 1975 to 1977.

That connects the Modi story with the second element in last week’s victory—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the Hindu-chauvinist organisation Modi joined as a young man. Modi’s second appearance in the Times of India came on 1 October 1979 when he received a cheque for 500,000 rupees as a contribution to RSS-led relief work after a disastrous flood that killed hundreds of people in the town of Morvi, in his home state of Gujarat. He had established himself as someone who got things done.

Founded in 1925 and modelled on Mussolini-style organisations in Europe, the RSS now has more than a million members. Fifty years ago, when I rode my bicycle on winter mornings to the school in north India where I taught, I used to marvel at the few dozen men in white shirts and khaki shorts who drilled with lathis (staffs, or rods) on a school parade ground before going off to their jobs in shops and offices. They were members of the RSS.

The ideological foundation of the RSS is the belief that India is a ‘Hindu nation’, suppressed for a thousand years by Muslim and European invaders and enervated today by ‘secular liberals’, an equivalent of the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ demonised in 20th-century Europe. The goal is to establish a strong Hindu nation, enforcing higher-caste beliefs and requiring non-Hindus and other deviationists to conduct themselves as grateful guests.

In the early 1950s, the RSS formed a political party, the Jana Sangh, which reconstituted itself as the BJP in the early 1980s. The relationship between the party and the movement can sometimes be rocky, but they find plenty of common ground at election time. Even as party leader, Modi remains a product of the RSS, and the dedicated RSS cadre has been essential to the rise and rise of the BJP.

Modi’s own rise in the 1980s owed something to the third element in the BJP’s victory. In 1989, India had a single government television service covering only 50% of the country. There were no more than 20 million TV sets in a population of 800 million, and most programming was ponderous. In 1987, however, a religious serialisation of the epic Ramayana brought the country to a stop on Sunday mornings. Over many weeks, the story of Lord Ram was told, and neighbours, servants and passers-by piled up in front of any available television set. The Ramayana series was followed by the other epic, the Mahabharata. The two series provided a ‘standard version’, a homogenisation of two great tales that had often been told in distinctive, local ways.

The BJP, far from power in the 1980s and desperate to mobilise support, staged a number of ‘chariot processions’ around the country, echoing how the deities in the TV epics had ridden in chariots. Modi appears to have been a key roadie and organiser for one or two of these popular events.

By 2000, India had 70 million television households receiving dozens of land-based and satellite channels. It was possible and profitable to telecast to all of India and create a single market. This was especially true in the north, where Hindi, spoken by about 40% of all Indians, was the prevalent language.

From the 1990s, benefiting from the expanding possibilities for Indians to see and speak to each other, the BJP’s parliamentary strength grew, and Modi’s prominence with it. He visited the United States in 1994 and 1999, partly to study media practices, and handled the party’s dealings with journalists.

Each of India’s six general elections since 1998 has exploited the latest innovations in media, and the BJP has usually been better at it than its opponents. For a lad who grew up in a world where ‘media’ meant government radio, Bombay movies and a big bakelite telephone locked in a box in a senior official’s room, Modi has been an eager and astute learner.

Today, no one in India is far from a mobile phone, and smartphone use is into the hundreds of millions. In this year’s election, the BJP deployed a vast stable of media professionals to out-WhatsApp and out-Instagram its opponents. The BJP had the money to do it well: its coffers overflowed, while the Congress, once the moneybags party, lacked such spending power.

The Congress was unable to stitch together a plausible opposition alliance, and Rahul Gandhi, its languid leader, had little to tell voters that they wanted to hear. Modi, on the other hand, benefited from the bloody scuffle with Pakistan, provoked when a suicide bomber killed more than 40 Indian paramilitary police. In retaliation, the Indian air force launched what was portrayed as a brilliant ‘surgical strike’ against ‘terrorist bases’ in Pakistan, and the bold prime minister took some of the credit. A spoonful of patriotic fervour helped the electoral medicine go down.

Modi’s government could also point to visible achievements—roads built, villages electrified, an ambitious attempt to create a ‘clean India’ that showed some modest achievements, and a national health insurance scheme. A well-resourced social media operation and a largely compliant press and television disseminated the good news.

What happens now? If it is more of the same, that means the continued transformation of state institutions into clients of the ruling party—in education, law, regulation and defence. It means the continued favouring of particular capitalists and entrepreneurs, Gautam Adani among them.

It also means more name changes: ‘Muslim’ places on the map replaced by ‘Hindu’ names. It means more nudge-nudge, wink-wink opportunities to put ‘liberals’ and non-Hindus—Muslims, but also Christians—in their place. ‘Teach them a lesson’ is a phrase you sometimes hear. Modi, of course, was chief minister of Gujarat during such a teaching session in 2002, when hundreds of Muslims were murdered around the state in retaliation for the murders in a small-town railway station of a carriage full of Hindus, apparently by a Muslim mob.

The hollowing out of India’s shaky institutions will continue. Already, the Election Commission of India, one of the country’s most respected institutions, is under scrutiny because its three commissioners are at odds. One of them asserts that his colleagues let the prime minister and BJP get away with flagrant breaches of the campaign code of conduct.

Looking at the electoral map of India, one sees that the north and west, stretching from Karnataka in the southwest to Bihar in the east, have overwhelmingly returned the BJP. But the rest of the south and portions of the east coast, including Odisha and West Bengal, have voted for local political parties.

India’s federation offers a resilient flexibility, but the BJP and the RSS often proclaim that they want to dominate the whole subcontinent. They now have the opportunity to focus on the states that have spurned them so far.

The party will soon also control the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, whose members are elected by the members of state legislatures. It takes a two-thirds majority of both houses to amend the constitution, something the BJP is likely to want to do to introduce ‘Hindu principles’ and eliminate aspects of ‘secular liberalism’. In this sense, India seems part of a global pattern of states welcoming ‘strongmen’ who emphasise ‘national values’, as defined by them.

The BJP and RSS are way ahead of this trend. The Jana Sangh, forerunner of the BJP, laid down in its manifesto long ago that ‘Bharatiya [Hindu] culture is thus one and indivisible. Any talk of composite culture, therefore, is unrealistic, illogical and dangerous.’

Yet India, with its 22 official languages, 29 states, hundreds of castes and millions of Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, constitutes a rich biriyani full of herbs and spices, cashews and sultanas. Trying to make a biriyani into a smoothie may not produce particularly digestible results.

Modi’s re-election and the future of Indian democracy

In what amounts to a clean sweep, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have won a fresh mandate from the Indian electorate to rule for another five years. There are many factors that have contributed to the outcome.

Probably the most important was the BJP’s success in making this into a presidential-style election and turning it into a referendum on Modi’s charismatic and pugnacious persona. This strategy was aided by the opposition’s inability to project a single credible prime ministerial candidate because of the lack of consensus among the opposition parties. There were several reasons for this, including the oversized ambitions of several party leaders and the fact that in a number of states regional parties that formed the bulk of the opposition to the BJP were locally pitted against the Indian National Congress party.

BJP exploited the ‘dynastic’ nature of the Congress party to the hilt, especially after Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the sister of party president Rahul Gandhi, was inducted into the Congress leadership in the run-up to the elections. The Congress also played into the BJP’s hands by running a largely negative campaign against Modi personally. That strategy boomeranged: it allowed Modi to hog the limelight and relegate his government’s lackluster policy performance to the background.

Policy issues turned out to be of marginal concern to the electorate. This was surprising given the visible distress in the agricultural sector, the highest rate of unemployment in 45 years, the mess created by demonetisation in 2016 that affected the average Indian adversely, and the impact of the goods and services tax, which created resentment in much of the business sector. Macroeconomic indicators also signalled a noticeable slowdown in economic growth, but much of this data either was fudged by the government or was too complicated for most voters to understand.

The election was decided on emotional rather than policy issues. Modi successfully made national security a central issue in his election campaign. He was aided in this endeavour by a major terrorist attack in Kashmir in February for which a Pakistan-based terrorist outfit claimed responsibility. The terrorist attack and the Indian air strike deep into Pakistani territory in response to it provided the BJP with an election bonanza by creating the image of a decisive prime minister who could teach Pakistan a lesson even at the cost of risking a war between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

BJP’s exploitation of national security as a major election theme enabled it to talk up its credentials as the primary proponent of Hindu nationalism. The BJP media trolls linked any attempt by the Congress to counter Modi’s national security narrative and the hyper-nationalism it engineered to its presumed policy of ‘Muslim appeasement’ and the consequent ‘soft’ policy towards Pakistan.

Anticipating such a move, the Congress leadership began to emphasise the party’s Hindu credentials more than a year ago by adopting a ‘soft’ Hindutva posture against the ‘hard’ Hindutva of the BJP. By doing so, the Congress turned itself into the BJP’s B team and sacrificed its commitment to India as a plural society. But the strategy failed miserably because as a pale imitation of the BJP’s aggressive Hindutva, the Congress couldn’t compete with the genuine article.

The equating of Hindu nationalism with Indian nationalism is now taken for granted by large sections of the Indian population. This is demonstrated by the fact that Yogi Adityanath—the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, and an intensely anti-Muslim Hindu monk—was the second most sought-after speaker after Modi in the BJP’s election rallies across the country. The media amplified the majoritarian and hyper-nationalist instincts in the country and often conflated the two. This helped BJP propagandists to denigrate the opposition’s attempts to ask the government legitimate questions about national security issues.

One should also not ignore the fact that a major contributor to the BJP’s victory was the disciplined and ideologically committed cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the parent body of the BJP and the ideological font of Hindu nationalism. These cadres catalysed pro-BJP voters to turn out in large numbers. In contrast, the Congress as an amorphous organisation is bereft of committed cadres. Its so-called workers are largely opportunists or hired hands. Regional parties, such as the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, that have committed cadres did reasonably well in the face of the BJP juggernaut but are incapable of providing a pan-national alternative to the ruling party.

The BJP victory is likely to have long-lasting effects on the Indian polity. The party has been accused of subverting the autonomy of institutions, such as the Election Commission and the Central Bureau of Investigations, that are critical to the success of democracy in the country. Under Modi, it has also been blamed for promoting a form of populism and a cult of personality that could be conducive to the rise of authoritarianism.

India needs a strong and unified opposition that’s committed to principles of liberal democracy in order to keep these tendencies in check. However, this election indicates that no such formation is currently on the horizon. In the absence of a credible alternative to the BJP, there’s a danger that, while procedural democracy may endure, the liberal spirit undergirding it could be in danger of extinction.

The silences of the Australian election

Election campaigns involve loud argument and quiet consensus—and then there are the silences.

Silences point to hard stuff just offstage: no-go, too dangerous.

For political parties, breaking the silence introduces complexity that tends towards tangled nuance, toppling into dilemmas and hard choices. There be conundrums and nightmares.

Risk-averse parties embrace silences, invoking on-message discipline. Don’t scare or confuse voters. The corollary is that parties don’t want to declare and decide.

In this federal election campaign, international issues show how consensus fades quickly to silence. The biggies are the dragon conundrum, the Uncle Sam nightmare, the international unravelling, and a solo mime—the government’s silent scream on climate change.

While much of Australia loudly argues the dragon-slayer-versus-panda-hugger puzzle, the parties tip-toe around the dragon in the room.

After the fifth icy age with China, the Coalition and Labor don’t want to slip on the ice again.

Enter the ever-vivid Paul Keating, never one for silence.

The former prime minister delivered a mighty swipe, calling for dragon slayers to be banished: ‘When the security agencies are running foreign policy, the nutters are in charge’, Keating told the ABC. ‘You’d clean them out. You’d clean them out.’

Labor disavowed Keating, pledging no Canberra purge.

The no-purge-no-nutters-here promise should mean that Labor, if victorious, won’t axe Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo. The ABC’s Andrew Greene makes that point in an astute piece which had a sharp Canberra quote from a ‘senior official’ on the security threats facing a Shorten government: ‘The three Bs are the biggest threats to Bill Shorten once he’s in office; boats, bombs, and bytes.’

Add Beijing to that B list. The panda pressures push and pull.

Neither side can play the usual reset card of ‘new government, new day’. There’s no going back to the future with China, as Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong notes: ‘It is not simply a matter of a “diplomatic reset.” Fundamentally, we are in a new phase in the relationship.’

Wong says the ‘complex and consequential’ panda pressures will persist and could get harder. Amen. Her answer is an uneasy balance: ‘First, we don’t pre-emptively frame China only as a threat. Second, we must be grounded in the realities.’

Amen, as far as it goes. You can see why the parties prefer panda silence during the campaign.

On the other side of Saturday’s vote, though, loud moments of truth await. Not least, as Michael Shoebridge writes, is identifying the ‘sophisticated state actor’ that hacked into the Australian parliament’s information system and the networks of the Labor, Liberal and National parties.

US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, offers the mirror reverse of the dragon conundrum. Australia loves the alliance but fears Uncle Sam’s economic intent.

In the trade war, Australia wants Beijing to give enough for Trump to claim victory and declare peace. But Australia detests Trump’s protectionist, trade-bloc vision—all about America’s might, not what’s right.

A striking silence—both in policy and in politics—is the collapse of any sense of principle in Australian trade policy.

Once, Australia had standing as an intellectual and practical force in the World Trade Organization and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a significant player in international trade, Australia created and led the Cairns Group. Today, the Cairns Group is limping, not loud.

Australia’s only interest in talking to Trump has been as a small target, seeking exemption from US tariffs. Australia should be mounting loud protests and principled arguments against Trump as he hacks at the WTO and the rules that have made the world better and richer.

That bring us to the international unravelling. As former intelligence chief and wise owl Allan Gyngell put it, ‘[T]he order we have known for the past seventy years has ended. It’s not being challenged. It’s not changing. It’s over.’

The ‘unravelling’ view sees the constant fretting about the ‘rules-based order’ in the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper as a lament for the recently departed.

The unravelling hasn’t featured in the campaign or the leaders’ debates. But it’ll be the central motif of the incoming government briefs from the defence and foreign affairs departments. Drawing on DFAT’s description of international trends in last month’s budget document, the concerns will range from rising nationalism and geopolitical competition to anti-globalisation and protectionist sentiments, along with a shift in power in the Indo-Pacific ‘without precedent in Australia’s modern history’ and wider trends such as climate change and urbanisation.

Top of defence’s brief will be: ‘The first priority is to manage great power competition in the Indo-Pacific.’

The silent scream of the campaign has been the Coalition’s inability to say anything about the megatrend that’s the top issue for many voters: climate change.

The Coalition has been screaming at itself for so long it’s lost its voice.

Climate was the policy issue that twice toppled Malcolm Turnbull, once as opposition leader, then as prime minister. Labor adopted Turnbull’s energy policy, so the Coalition can only argue about cost, not detail or intent or the size of the problem.

The silences last till Saturday. And then …

Australia may turn inward at election time, but the big questions won’t go away

The federal election on 18 May will decide political power, and open or close Canberra doors on many other dimensions of power.

The broad consensus on foreign policy and defence between the Liberal–National coalition and Labor means those areas won’t get much campaign airtime.

Australia’s festival of democracy will be intensely domestic. Time to sizzle the democracy sausages and have a wonderful argument about who will run the country.

Fortunate is the nation that can turn inward to its ultimate power contest without giving much attention to the uncertain geopolitical and geoeconomic context. This column is about three power issues Canberra needs to deal with that will hardly blip on the campaign screen: the future of the Department of Home Affairs, the future of Oz international broadcasting, and the future of Oz soft power in changing power settings of the Indo-Pacific.

International broadcasting and soft power are two bits of unfinished business left over by the Turnbull/Morrison government. They’ll feature in the briefings that departments are preparing for whoever wins the election—a red book for Labor, a blue book for the Coalition.

The government ordered departmental inquiries on both topics that now await the outcome of the sausage sizzle.

The international broadcasting report (by the Department of Communications and the Arts and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) is done and has been with ministers for a while. It hasn’t been released. Perhaps it was a low priority that just didn’t get to cabinet. Perhaps it’s a bit embarrassing for the Coalition because of past neglect in the area.

The soft power inquiry is coasting to the finish line. It was promised in the 2017 foreign policy white paper. Where does soft power fit in the firmament of Canberra? That’s a question with bureaucratic as well as political aspects. And when Julie Bishop stepped down as foreign minister, she was no longer there to push a concept she’d championed.

I’ve written a lot on the intersection of broadcasting and soft power and was a co-author of ASPI’s report Hard news and free media as the sharp edge of Australian soft power. Rather than re-hashing those Strategist columns, I’d merely make the obvious point that while Australia can turn inward for its election, that’s a momentary luxury. As DFAT put it, this is a tough new era of ‘rising nationalism and geo-political competition, anti-globalisation and trade protectionism, a shift in power in the Indo-Pacific without precedent in Australia’s modern history’.

The times call for an active and creative Australia using every element of its power, including a loud international voice.

The times may also demand a big new beast of a Canberra department—Home Affairs—but the case for it is still being made.

A re-elected Morrison government must consider how Home Affairs has bedded down. A new Labor government must ponder whether to upend that bed or just remake it.

Announcing the creation of the Home Affairs portfolio in 2017, the Turnbull government called it ‘the most significant reform of Australia’s national intelligence and domestic security arrangements in more than 40 years’.

While that description of the magnitude of the bureaucratic creation is true, the intelligence community didn’t want it. The big Canberra departments fought against it. Turnbull’s own independent review didn’t see the need for it.

Governments are there to do stuff, and this was certainly Turnbull doing something. Part of the reason for the creation was Turnbull’s need to throw a giant bone to an important minister he wanted to keep on side. Having chewed on that bone for a while, Peter Dutton then turned around and delivered his prime minister a fatal bite.

The power Home Affairs can wield is already apparent. In a fine series on Turnbull’s demise, Peter Hartcher describes the last meeting of cabinet’s National Security Committee under Turnbull, in which Dutton and Bishop took opposing positions on four major agenda items.

This was the meeting, in August, where Australia was to decide a threshold question on the building of its 5G telecommunications network, the hyperconnected system to sustain the so-called ‘internet of things’—would China’s giant Huawei be permitted some involvement, or banned?

Dutton prevailed on all four matters, including the Huawei decision …

Dutton left the cabinet room with a victor’s swagger; Bishop, humiliated, was on the verge of tears.

If Labor wins on 18 May, its platform commits it to review the Home Affairs portfolio arrangements ‘to ensure they are fit for purpose’. Assuming the department survives, as Michelle Grattan argues, ‘a major issue would be whether it lost oversight of two key agencies, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’.

If Scott Morrison turns the opinion polls around and wins, he might think it’s time to use Dutton’s capacities elsewhere. Defence, maybe?

Whoever wins, it’ll be the chance for a fresh look at Home Affairs. John Coyne’s idea of a green paper to explore all policy options would work for either side.

The current political mentality in Canberra decrees that no government should ever ask questions rather than offer firm answers. That’s why the open-minded, public exploration of all policy options has fallen out of favour. And departmental inquiries, as we’ve seen with broadcasting and soft power, can get stuck inside the system.

A Home Affairs green paper would offer lots of interesting thoughts on the future size and colour of this important new department.

The uncertain geopolitics and geoeconomics of the federal election

Australia zipped through budget week and now zooms off to the May federal election.

The country will get to vote on the budget before the parliament, which means its tax-and-spend promises are written in sand.

What’s chiselled in the budget documents—enduring beyond the election—is a set of geopolitical and geoeconomic judgements about the state of the world.

The geo settings in the budget outlook document and the portfolio statements are always revealing. Look for the caveats and cautions offered, plus the way surprises and shifts are acknowledged or hinted. What are the trends and how blow the winds?

The nods towards surprise from the Defence and Foreign Affairs and Trade departments last week are how things have shifted since their big policy statements—the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

DFAT gives the flavour with the ‘strategic direction statement’ in its budget document:

Since the White Paper’s release, many of the international trends identified within it have intensified – rising nationalism and geo-political competition, anti-globalisation and trade protectionism, a shift in power in the Indo-Pacific without precedent in Australia’s modern history, rapid technological advances that are changing the way economies and societies work, and mega trends such as climate change and urbanisation. These trends are testing Australia’s policy settings and demanding new efforts in several areas.

Distil the department’s prognosis, its geo crystal balling, from the second paragraph of the strategic musings:

  • The global environment is more uncertain than any time since the end of World War 2.
  • The Indo-Pacific is in the midst of a major strategic realignment.
  • The world is moving to a new, more multipolar era.
  • Australia and the region face fundamental challenges to long-term prosperity and security.

Add to those points the top-of-mind issue for the era offered by Defence Minister Christopher Pyne in December: ‘The first priority is to manage great power competition in the Indo‑Pacific.’

Such settings mean cash flows to national security. ASPI followed the budget money trails here. As Marcus Hellyer reported, the defence budget continues to deliver as expected, hovering a little over 1.9% of GDP on the long march ‘to the promised land of 2% of GDP’.

Defence’s budget statement refers back to the 2016 white paper forecast of greater strategic uncertainty because of ‘changes in the distribution of power in the Indo-Pacific and globally’. The shift/surprise that’s then singled out is in the South Pacific:

Since the release of the 2016 Defence White Paper, some strategic trends have accelerated – arguably faster than was anticipated when the White Paper was drafted. Defence responded to some of these trends, along with other agencies, in devising new measures under the Pacific Step-Up announced by Government in late 2018.

You don’t have to mention China by name to be talking about China. In the South Pacific, Australia sees its strategic interests directly challenged by China. That’s the pointy end of the Pacific pivot.

The geoeconomic report card from Treasury comes from a relatively sunnier place than the geopolitical climate described by Defence and DFAT.

The international economic outlook pins its hopes to the notion that US President Donald Trump will cut a deal with China, declare victory, and end the trade war:

There have been recent signs that an escalation of trade tensions between the US and China is less likely; however, trade policy uncertainty remains elevated between a number of economies and global trade growth has eased. This uncertain outlook for trade tensions has been weighing on confidence, new export orders and investment intentions. Escalation of tensions would be expected to negatively affect growth in a number of countries including in Australia’s major trading partners. Conversely, a resolution of tensions could result in global growth that is stronger than forecast.

The uncertainty meme keeps recurring. Treasury lists a high degree of uncertainty around the global growth outlook, uncertainty surrounding measures of global confidence, risks around the Italian financial sector, Brexit, and the fact that financial markets now expect monetary policy to remain accommodative or neutral for longer than before.

Australia’s trade, as Treasury notes, is oriented more towards Asia than Europe. So along with the geostrategic winds roiling the Indo-Pacific, there’s a lot of work to be done and money to be made: ‘Growth in Australia’s major trading partners has outpaced global growth over the past decade and this is expected to continue over the forecast horizon as growth in the Asian region remains relatively strong.’

When it lifts its eyes beyond that horizon, Treasury goes to the basics of people, production and productivity:

Over the longer term, unfavourable demographics will constrain potential growth rates in some of the world’s major economies. Slower productivity growth could also limit productive capacity in many countries. Future global productivity growth will depend on the dispersion of technology, the mobility of capital and the degree of openness and competition maintained across economies.

The geo report cards are in. Thanks for that, world. We’ll get back to you after May. Australia is off to enjoy, and endure, a festival of democracy.