Tag Archive for: policy

Make no mistake, command and control will crush ASPI’s independence

For China watchers, there’s a grim irony contained in the 14 principles that former senior official Peter Varghese recommends in his long-awaited review into national security think tanks, released last week.

Fourteen was also the number of grievances the Chinese embassy notoriously unveiled in 2020 and that Beijing expected to be addressed if diplomatic relations were to improve – the 10th of which was defunding the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Beijing hasn’t quite got its way through the recommendations of Varghese, who is now chancellor of the University of Queensland. But the embassy’s champagne stocks may be a little depleted once its officials have measured his list against their own.

Beyond the impact on ASPI itself, there is a deeper danger in the principles, accepted by the Albanese government: the push to exercise more control over think tanks and to dampen the contestability that researchers provide.

ASPI was set up in 2001 precisely to contest the advice that the Howard government was receiving from the Department of Defence. We have since grown into a broader national security think tank that looks at modern threats ranging from cyber and disinformation to authoritarian abuses of power in places such as China’s Xinjiang.

We are recognised globally for our groundbreaking work on China – none of which is convenient to the government’s narrative of diplomatic stability with Beijing. The idea that the security issues ASPI has pursued independently – and often well ahead of national and global trends – may in future be given the thumbs up or down by ministers and bureaucrats is deeply unsettling. Yet the Varghese report recommends this command-and-control approach.

After delivering the 50-page report, Varghese then wrote an op-ed in these pages at the weekend responding to the responses to his report. This is ironic given his report’s criticism of “op-ed overreach”. The problem with Varghese’s insistence that we all just need a Bex and a good lie-down is that a veritable chasm exists between his rhetoric expressing support for think tank independence and the actions he’s actually recommending.

First, think tanks would have to bid against one another for operational funding. That sounds superficially appealing, but if two institutes are competing for a grant and one has been nicer to the sitting government, who is better placed? Not all think tanks will resist self-censorship when they know fearless critiques may jeopardise future funding.

Second, ministers and their departments would set priorities for research, meaning anything that didn’t match the government’s agenda or was sensitive could be discouraged.

If an organisation wanted to look at China’s political and hybrid warfare, or the rapid and opaque modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, this might not go ahead if it didn’t suit the government. The government’s response here went further than Varghese by adding ministers, not just department heads, as gatekeepers.

Third, the government will require government officials to sit on think tank councils, making them at least an observer during think tanks’ internal deliberations and perhaps even a voice to influence meetings. Again, the government’s response went further than Varghese’s recommendations.

This is inconsistent with the many other organisations that receive federal funding.

And while Varghese points out some entities already have government officials on their boards, he leaves unanswered his own question of whether they have had independence compromised. The answer is yes, a government official sitting on a non-government board likely has impact, including to censor criticism.

Fourth, specific federally funded research projects would be “co-designed” by bureaucrats, potentially putting guardrails on the researchers’ instincts.

The government gives grant money to the arts but nobody expects a bureaucrat to stand over the artists telling them how to stage a performance of Hamlet or do an interpretative dance.

Finally, there is the shutting of support for ASPI’s Washington office. Here, Varghese appears simply not to understand the role of think tanks’ overseas offices – saying it’s a problem “having ASPI freelance”. Freelance is a synonym of independence and, to be clear, we are independent and not there to push the views of the government of the day.

We are there to foster debate on issues that are important to Australia and its people, such as Indo-Pacific security and global rules. This has long-term value.

ASPI is known and respected across the political aisle in Washington for its nonpartisan and hard-hitting work, with many in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, including incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio, citing our research numerous times.

So it makes zero sense that the Australian government would narrow rather than expand Australia’s options for engaging with Washington when the US is moving into a new Trump administration that will bring challenges for the Australian bureaucracy.

Varghese himself acknowledges that the kind of contestability ASPI was established to provide is essential and refers to our research as “groundbreaking”. Regrettably he also refers to our China research – on human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Beijing’s interference in Australia and other countries – as controversial. Let’s face it, it was controversial only in the sense that Beijing didn’t like it.

Some of this review’s recommendations are reasonable and welcome, but the problems at its heart represent an abandonment of principles that successive governments for more than 20 years have recognised and respected.

Still, ASPI believes in our mission to pour sunlight on security threats to Australia and to help improve understanding – whether among policymakers or the public – of the steps needed to keep ourselves safe. We will continue to build on our proud legacy – because this work has never been more vital.

Tag Archive for: policy

ASPI’s decades: Strategy

Dark globe.

ASPI will celebrate its 20th anniversary later this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

The name is the game: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

ASPI thinks about strategy. And the alchemy of dollars, deeds and dreams that turn strategy into policy.

To the threshold question—posed by wit or cynic—of whether Australia has a strategy, turn to the response 45 years ago of Professor T.B. Millar, prefacing  his book Australia in peace and war: ‘Having written all these words, I would reply: if a policy has so much history, who can doubt that the policy exists!’

On the Millar measure, ASPI’s wordage over two decades proves Australia’s effort to do strategy.

The institute’s discussion of what Australian strategy should be is spiced by argument about what strategy is.

ASPI ignited at a line from former Foreign Minister Bob Carr in his memoir: ‘All foreign policy is a series of improvisations.’ In response, eight writers debated Strategy and its discontents.

What was strategy’s core business? Who should practise it? Is enough strategy being done in Canberra by Foreign Affairs, Defence or other parts of government?

Peter Jennings pondered the difference between good crisis managers and poor long-term planners: ‘Countries that invest in strategic thinking and planning have more capacity to deliver better quality policy. Countries that don’t take strategy seriously risk policy drift and ultimately losing national advantage.’

Robert Ayson responded that strategy and planning aren’t synonymous, and strategy can be more a state of mind than a formal process.

Rod Lyon thought Canberra’s grand strategy was Australia’s project for the world: ‘No-one writes it down for the simple reason that it isn’t the property of one person. Nor, I suppose, is it ever fulfilled, so there’s no sense of the objective’s being reached.’

Starting from the Greek noun strategos meaning ‘general’ (hence ‘strategy’, or the ‘art of generalship’), Nic Stuart lamented the weight modern strategy has to carry: ‘“Strategy” now covers everything from the work of a commanding general right through to culture (making us all think correctly) and business (so we’ll buy more widgets). It’s now being expected to define the thinking work of politicians, too.’

Anthony Bergin was less dismissive of business insights, saying that much could be gleaned from the best management gurus: good strategy is an educated judgement about what will work, while bad strategy is vacuous and superficial, tripping over its internal contradictions.

Strategy’s future, according to Jennings, depends on the capacity to vanquish the four horseman of policy eclipse: ‘short-termism; risk aversion; groupthink; and failures of imagination’.

A later offering from Peter Layton quoted the dictum that strategy is about ends, ways and means. The optimism of strategy, Layton wrote, is not a realist spiral into ‘nightmares of forever wars’, but the effort and imagination of better ends: ‘[T]he trade of the strategist is to focus on how to make better futures rather than map the descent routes into bad ones.’

Strategy is an attempt to think long term amid the noise and improvisation of events, and ASPI arrived on the scene at a momentous moment.

The institute was registered as a government-owned company on 22 August 2001. Three weeks later, the 9/11 decade was born as the planes struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. As the institute was finalising its first strategic assessment in October 2002, jihadist bombers struck in Bali. Thus, the title of the assessment became Beyond Bali, identifying three core challenges for the new decade:

  • Combat terrorism: ‘We now face an unprecedented risk from terrorism, and our most urgent policy priority must be to respond effectively.’
  • Stop further deterioration in the security environment in the Asia–Pacific over coming years.
  • Maintain and possibly increase the defence capabilities announced in the government’s 2000 defence white paper.

In 2004, Power shift: challenges for Australia in Northeast Asia argued that the balance of power and influence in Northeast Asia was undergoing profound and fundamental shifts.

William Tow and Russell Trood wrote that China had embarked on a comprehensive strategy to become a pre-eminent regional power: ‘The path to a new regional order with China at its epicentre could easily be uneven, but its direction is clear.’ Japan had set out to become a ‘normal’ state, engaging with its neighbours and re-evaluating the long-term importance of the US alliance.

ASPI developed an early habit of offering a strategic overview to Australia’s political leaders at the time of a federal election. The election in October 2004 prompted Scoping studies: new thinking on security. The 11 contributors found many pieces to puzzle over in the previous five years: the intervention in East Timor, the 9/11 attacks and the new perils of terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the future of the US alliance in a dynamic Asia–Pacific.

Rod Lyon described a transformation of the international security environment. Old enemies had been static and hierarchical. New enemies were dynamic, networked and evolving. Lyon saw conceptual shock:

This deep-level change in the international system will have profound consequences for our security. We cannot continue in the same old way, treating interstate war as ‘real war’ and everything else as peripheral. We are at one of those rare historical junctures where decades of strategic continuity are unravelling. Our enemies are changing and our doctrines are breaking down.

In 2005, one of the greats of Australian strategy, Coral Bell, weighed in with Living with giants: finding Australia’s place in a more complex world on the ‘unstoppable and accelerating’ shift of global power eating away at the ‘unipolar world of US paramountcy’.

Two emerging patterns could advantage Australia. The first was a regional security community in the Asia–Pacific, starting with ‘a simple resolution by a group of countries that they won’t go to war with each other again’.

The second pattern was the need for a global concert of powers (a ‘company of giants’) to avoid hegemonial war as new great powers (China and India) arrived in the magic circle. If the concert of powers couldn’t be reached, Bell wrote, then instead it would have to be a balance of power:

[T]he greatest world dangers and the most pressing demands on our ability to cope remain likely to come, just as they did in 1941, from conflicts between the great powers of the central balance, rather than from regional crises, however acute, or from the jihadists. A new Cold War, between the US and China, or between Japan and China, or between India and China, or between a Russia–China coalition and the US, with whatever allies it could recruit in Asia and the Pacific, would provide true nightmares.

A modest but effective international engagement plan from NSW

The recent release by the New South Wales Government of an International Engagement Strategy invites comparison with the federal blueprint, the Asian Century White Paper. Both aim to boost growth via more overseas contact but in other respects the two documents couldn’t be more different.

The NSW strategy is low-key, mercifully short at 38 pages, practical and sets measurable and achievable objectives. Its modest plans for increasing NSW’s trade and tourism offices overseas are costed and it seems the government will fund their go-ahead.

Contrast this with the Asian Century White Paper, launched six months ago and relentlessly promoted since. That strategy is a whopping 300 plus pages and proposes what can only be described as tectonic shifts in many areas of national life. It sets out no less than 25 national objectives for 2025 with multiple ‘policy pathways’ to achieve these goals. Targets are set to put Australia’s per capita GDP in the world’s top ten by 2025; our schools in the world’s top five; a national goal to be in the top ten innovating countries, and so on. Read more