Tag Archive for: Scott Morrison

Censorship risks and electoral impact: Australia’s major parties need to drop WeChat

Scott Morrison demanded three things in his emotionally charged press conference about ‘that tweet’ last week. One: an apology, two: that the Chinese government remove foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian’s post, and three: that Twitter remove the post.

None of the demands were met. Instead, even as the prime minister’s fulmination over Beijing’s deliberate provocation was still echoing around the world, the only post that was removed was his own statement on the issue that his team had posted to the Chinese social media platform WeChat.

In the now-censored post, Morrison delivered a message he should have led with in the first place. He said that Australia was a ‘free, democratic’ country and was using an ‘honest and transparent process’ to deal with the allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan.

‘Where there are alleged events that have taken place that require action, well we have set up the honest and transparent processes for that to take place. That is what a free, democratic, liberal country does’, he wrote.

Morrison’s comments were replaced with a notice from WeChat saying the post involved ‘the use of words, pictures, videos’ that would ‘incite, mislead and violate objective facts, fabricating social hot topics, distorting historical events and confusing the public’.

But when the prime minister was asked if he was making ‘representations’ to Twitter and WeChat about their content-moderation decisions, he told reporters it was a matter for the social media companies.

‘We have made our views clear on that and they can make an explanation of their action if they choose to make one’, he said.

Deleting the social media post of Australia’s leader would seem to be a fairly drastic move that would warrant a stern and strident reaction and a demand for an explanation. So why was Morrison’s response to this apparent act of censorship so limp?

One reason is clear. What WeChat did was totally within its rules, and the prime minister knows it.

Morrison has known for at least a year and a half that, because his account is registered to an unnamed man in Fujian province, any message he posts from it is subject to China’s censorship rules.

The PM is not alone. When the ABC looked into the situation in April 2019, it found no less than a dozen accounts operated by Australian politicians that were registered to random people in the People’s Republic of China.

The Australian politicians who have set up their WeChat accounts this way are actually in breach of the platform’s terms and conditions. Under WeChat’s rules, ‘the initial registration applicant shall not donate, borrow, rent, transfer or sell the Weixin [WeChat] account, nor permit any non-initial registration applicant to use the Weixin account’. That means they could be shut down at a moment’s notice, even during a hotly contested election, for example.

Aside from the fact that this arrangement opens up politicians to censorship from Beijing, it also puts the PRC nationals in whose names the accounts are registered in serious danger.

If one of these politicians were inclined to post a message that crossed one of Beijing’s many political red lines—as the prime minister did last week—the account owner could be detained by Chinese authorities.

In fact, just a couple of days after the prime minister’s WeChat account was censored, the Victorian Liberal Party’s WeChat account was stripped of its name by the platform for breaking its rules.

That account is tied to a Shanghai-based company that is registered to Locky Ge, the founder and chief executive of fintech company RoyalPay, a Melbourne-based start-up which has partnered with Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) to roll out WeChat payment to Australian consumers.

So why are politicians and political parties so willing to put themselves in a position where they could be censored by Beijing and endanger the safety of Chinese citizens?

After all, they could mitigate some of these concerns if, instead of using what’s referred to on WeChat as a ‘subscription account’ (订阅号), which requires registration via a Chinese national third party, they used a ‘service account’ (服务号), which does not.

The reason they don’t do this? Simple. A ‘subscription account’ allows for one push-notification-enabled article a day. A ‘service account’ only allows for four push-notification-enabled articles a month.

The Australian Labor Party, presumably by contacting Tencent directly, has attempted to strike a balance between these security and censorship concerns and its electoral need to communicate directly with Chinese-Australian voters. Labor has a ‘subscription account’ that anomalously is not registered to anyone.

Clearly, WeChat does not provide a level playing field. Australia’s two major parties find themselves in a classic prisoner’s dilemma: if either of them makes too much of a fuss about Tencent’s lack of transparency, they could be penalised by the platform and give their domestic political opponents a distinct electoral advantage.

That advantage isn’t trivial. There are several marginal seats at the federal level in Australia (and more at the state level) with large numbers of WeChat-using Chinese-Australian voters in them. Chisholm in Victoria and Banks, and Reid and Bennelong in New South Wales are prime examples. When the difference between being in government and being in opposition comes down to a handful of seats, the use of WeChat could potentially be decisive.

With the next federal election likely to be held in 2022, now would be a good time for the Liberal and Labor parties to mutually agree to stop using WeChat as a campaign channel and to start work on bipartisan legislation to properly regulate this influential platform.

Metaphorical militarisation: Covid-19 and the language of war

This article is part of ASPI’s 2020 series on women, peace and security.

‘[W]e are in a war against this virus and all Australians are enlisted to do the right thing.’

— Prime Minister Scott Morrison, 60 Minutes interview, 22 March 2020

Covid-19 is consistently framed as a war by both politicians and the media, and why not? This is an existential crisis that will change our lives, possibly forever, and addressing the pandemic requires decisive action, concentrated resources and community-wide cooperation.

Many useful analyses of the relevance of the women, peace and security agenda in responding to Covid-19 have been published that might be read as implying that the war metaphor is legitimate or accurate. But, in reality, WPS principles and feminist foreign-policy analysis help us understand that the war framing is fundamentally unhelpful for three reasons: it alienates and divides people and groups, it ducks accountability for change, and it is really unimaginative at a time when we need to develop more creative and inclusive responses to big challenges.

In Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison leans towards metaphor rather than the outright war rhetoric of his counterparts in the US, the UK and France. His communications are also steeped in nationalism: he talks of ‘summon[ing] the spirit of the Anzacs … [o]f those who won the great peace of the Second World War and defended Australia’ and affirming that ‘Australians will always be Australians’.

Whether it’s coming from Morrison, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Emmanuel Macron, the reference is clearly to World War II. As the renowned research professor Cynthia Enloe, who studies gender and militarism, writes, ‘leaders cherry-pick their wars and cherry-pick what they want us to remember about each war’. This sidesteps the complexity of war and conflict, while harking back to a less-contested, male and white ‘militarized nostalgia’ around sacrifice, leadership and making do. It assumes that ‘war’ is something we all understand and are inspired by.

But linking ‘Australianness’ to World War II to rally or reassure citizens in our Covid-19 response assumes cultural understanding and experience that are not shared equally. It ignores the reality that nearly half of all Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent who was born overseas and have Australian identities forged long after the war. It overlooks the fact that only 2% of Australians are old enough to have a living memory of the war. It is silent on the exclusion of Indigenous people from the process of ‘nation making’ through war and the ongoing exclusion of Australia’s frontier wars from official recognition. It ignores the contributions of Australian peace movements, in which women played prominent roles, and it fails to acknowledge that women’s contributions in war and in peace have been historically (and arguably contemporaneously) marginalised by militarised and masculine constructs of ‘bravery and service’.

When we use the language of war to symbolise something good and noble for the purposes of crisis messaging, we ignore the disproportionate impact of conflict on women and girls and their marginalisation from decision-making in both war making and peace building. Papering over the very real and painful experiences of women in war is a poor way to reassure a community. And it’s particularly tone-deaf given that our Covid-19 response is built on women’s unpaid labour in the home and poorly paid and underappreciated labour in the caring and teaching sectors.

War rhetoric can also, by design or otherwise, dampen critical discourse. Such rhetoric implies defence of an ideal way of life to which we yearn to return—‘[W]e must not allow [the virus] to change who we are as Australians’. By excluding the possibility of change, we place off-limits any examination of underlying inequalities that exacerbate the impact of the virus, which in turn ‘externalises responsibilities for the fact that our system is ill-equipped to protect people’.

War framing suggests an urgency in which ‘now’ is never the time for critique—in wartime, we band together, we do not criticise. This is sadly familiar for those working in WPS, where too often we are too busy with conflict or too anxious for a quick peace deal to hear from women or give them decision-making power. But a further lesson from Enloe is that the construction of post-conflict societies happens concurrently with conflict. If we want to imagine an alternative way of life to be constructed ‘post-war’, now is the only time we have.

But perhaps the most egregious issue with viewing our response to a major crisis through a war lens is its complete lack of imagination. It’s an indictment on us collectively that we can’t think of a peaceful frame of reference for our need for community and state action and solidarity in response to a shared challenge. If our only response to a threat like Covid-19 is to force it into a war construct and slap conflict metaphors all over it, then we back ourselves into a dangerously narrow understanding of security.

Such a habit does not bode well for a more inclusive reimagining of security that takes account of global challenges like climate change, or domestic challenges like economic inequality and pervasive domestic violence. It not only suggests a lack of imagination in how we frame responses to these challenges, but also raises the risk that any response (and attendant resources) will be militarised and/or co-opted by ‘hard’ security sectors. Instead, we need to be open to a conception of security that considers state and human security from multiple points of view, and that has other tools in the toolbox besides war.

War framing is easy—it provides a linguistic shortcut for the solidarity and sacrifice needed to move through a crisis—but it’s lazy, it limits our imagination and it denies us the opportunity for a more sophisticated and inclusive framing for how we meet complex security challenges.

Annabelle Lukin, associate professor of linguistics at Macquarie University, puts it best:

In the new kind of coming together that this virus is forcing on us, it’s time to put away the dangerous book for boys, and to turn away from one of our most beloved sources of strength, courage and inspiration.

We must give birth to new metaphors of unity and commonwealth. We might save even more lives than this deadly virus looks set to take away.

Morrison’s chessboard

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s successful US visit should not be regarded as a ‘set and forget’ box-ticking exercise. Rather, it should be viewed as a sound basis for the government to pursue Australia’s national interests over the remainder of Donald Trump’s presidential term.

Notwithstanding the prime minister’s sharing of Trump’s embrace of ‘sovereignty’ and scepticism of certain UN bodies, trade looms as an area in which he will need to watch Trump closely. At the very least, Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria is a reminder that there will always be policy differences between Australia and the US.

Just over a year out from the presidential election, Trump will be looking to show that the US is ‘winning’. While he is highly unlikely to directly target Australia—we run a trade deficit with the US, pull our weight in defence spending, and are of growing strategic importance to the US—Trump’s trade goals may be inimical to Canberra’s. For example, although Australia and the US have agreed on a strategic partnership on energy in the Indo-Pacific, Trump will be keen for the US’s bourgeoning liquefied natural gas sector to get a slice of the action in the region.

As well as ensuring Australia isn’t sacrificed as part of any deal between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Morrison will need to be attuned to US thinking on trade agreements with the UK, EU and India. Complicating this is that the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes Australia, China and India—but not the US—could be concluded next month. Following this, there’s likely to be renewed eagerness by corporate Australia to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Expect a prime ministerial visit to Beijing sometime next year.

Before any visit to China, Morrison will go to India and Japan early next year. While the ‘Quad’ will colour much commentary, a card Morrison might play is reform of the UN Security Council by calling for permanent membership for India. (Trump has followed his predecessor Barack Obama in backing India as a permanent member.) While China would oppose such a move, it would be a powerful symbolic gesture that would affirm the Morrison government’s view that the UN needs reform to maintain its legitimacy. India’s proud non-aligned tradition will continue to act as a brake on it being an enthusiastic ‘Quad’ member.

Russia will become more prominent on the prime ministerial radar. President Vladimir Putin will play a decisive role in the endgame of the conflict in Syria and that will have implications for Turkey, a key partner of Australia’s. On the one hand, Putin will want to keep his ally Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria. On the other, Putin will see the US–Turkey tensions as a means of weakening Turkey’s commitment to NATO. If re-elected, Trump may choose to forge closer ties with Putin as a counter to China. And France, which, like Australia, is stepping up in the Pacific, is trying to bring Russia into the European tent, partly for the same reason.

While the Trump administration expects Australia to take more responsibility in the South Pacific, it’s also broadening strategic cooperation with Australia in infrastructure, overseas development, energy supply and critical minerals. Australia will encourage the US to build on these initiatives in forums such as APEC and the WTO and perhaps push for Trump to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership if he wins a second term. Last month’s signing of the Fiji–Australia Vuvale Partnership was a significant development, the prelude to the announcement of a joint peacekeeping mission in the Middle East. The partnership may serve as a guide to the Morrison government’s future engagement with other South Pacific nations.

The joint facilities will remain Australia’s most valued military contribution to the US alliance and will continue to grow in importance as strategic weight shifts to the Asia–Pacific region, space becomes more contested and nuclear arsenals are modernised. ‘Extended nuclear deterrence’ didn’t die with the Cold War, and nor did concerns about Australian sovereignty in relation to Pine Gap. Due to the evolving technical capability of the joint facilities, the Australian public may understandably feel entitled to a ministerial update more frequently than every five to six years.

While Australia hosting US missiles has been ruled out, there may be further collaborative developments in missile defence. This year’s US missile defense review stated: ‘Australia participates in a trilateral discussion on missile defence with the United States and Japan. The United States and Australia meet annually to discuss bilateral missile cooperation. New areas of focus include joint examination of the challenges posed by advanced missile threats.’

And out of left field, the crisis in Syria will put pressure on Trump to offer sanctuary to Kurdish refugees. Don’t rule out Trump asking Australia to assist in an effective quid quo pro for upholding the Australia–US refugee resettlement deal agreed by Obama and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The end of bipartisanship in Oz foreign policy?

The bipartisan tenor of Australia’s foreign policy is being stretched and tested.

Scott Morrison’s Coalition government talks tough on international policy. A touch of Donald Trump is trumpeted, as foes are found and lines drawn. Labor pushes back that the prime minister’s approach to foreign affairs is all tactic and no plan.

What’s fraying is the oft-vaunted habit of bipartisanship on foreign affairs. In normal Oz fashion, bipartisanship has both pragmatic and principled elements.

The principled view is that big interests are agreed, and the Liberal and Labor parties can down weapons and stand united on the international stage—that ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’. Politics seldom stops for much in Canberra, but you get the bipartisan idea, in principle anyway.

The pragmatic or self-interested side of bipartisanship helps buttress the principle: don’t waste your powder on overseas issues the voters don’t rate as important. Standing together on stuff beyond the water’s edge means the Liberals and Labor can easily share the necessary competency tick and move on to other issues.

The testing of this bipartisan calculus was on show last week at the annual conference in Canberra of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

At the same conference this time last year, there was a lot of bipartisan bonhomie in the opening session’s performances by Foreign Minister Marise Payne and her Labor counterpart Penny Wong. The two could easily have swapped speeches, apart from Wong’s attack on the government’s ‘deeply distressing and irresponsible climate policy’, and even that came with a preface about ‘trying to find an adjective that is not too undiplomatic’.

At the conference this year, much more undiplomatic stuff was on show. The international discussion reflects tougher times. Tone and temperature notched up in the addresses by the assistant minister for defence and minister for international development and the Pacific, Alex Hawke, and by Penny Wong.

Hawke’s discussion of values was that of a conservative government as worried about protecting its right flank as the usual threat from Labor on the left.

In both his speech and questions, Hawke referred to the way that ‘populism, protectionism, and illiberalism’ have jolted the international system; rely on politicians to rail at the poison they fear.

The answer to these ills, encapsulated in the penultimate paragraph of Hawke’s speech: ‘The Morrison government will continue to maintain a ruthless and pragmatic focus on our national interests.’

I’ve never heard an aid minister boasting in a speech about Australia being ‘ruthless and pragmatic’. But then, we’ve never before had a minister doing both the defence and aid jobs.

The joining of defence and aid says something about Morrison’s world view. It does express a Canberra truth that a past head of AusAID used to make: aid is the soft end of the defence budget. It’s a good line to use against the hard hearts and the realists (and the Morrison government does like hard, realist language).

Following Hawke (the politicians take the stage separately), Wong stepped up to rumble, saying she’d depart from Australia’s ‘tradition of a largely bipartisan approach to foreign policy’ because it’s time to speak out.

Wong said Morrison had adopted Trump tactics, using foreign policy to ‘distract and divert’, and being willing to use ‘reckless language and take risky decisions for domestic political gain’.

The shadow foreign minister set it up with a back-handed compliment: ‘There’s no doubt Scott Morrison is the best political tactician in Australia right now. He is the master of the political manoeuvre, but he hasn’t delivered anything of substance, because that’s not who he is.’

Morrison had ditched the one international plan the government has, she said, the 2017 foreign policy white paper, ‘which championed multilateralism and the rules-based order as fundamental to our national interest’.

Wong said Morrison deployed US-style populism in his ‘negative globalism’ speech earlier in the month at the Lowy Institute, where the prime minister claimed Australia was being told what to do by global organisations.

To adopt Trump’s anti-globalism language, she said, is to abandon the multilateral stance of previous Labor and Coalition governments, and risk Australia’s prosperity: ‘You can’t be pro-free trade and anti-globalist—and we all need to call Scott Morrison’s bluff on this. Even if Scott Morrison seeks to follow President Trump in closing Australia to immigration, he can never close Australia to trade.’

During questions, Wong quickly shifted back to bipartisan bedrock. Asked whether it’s time to ditch the US alliance, she replied: ‘The US alliance is beyond politics.’

The explicit bipartisanship is all about the US alliance. Trump is another place entirely; on The Donald, much of Canberra is moving beyond puzzled and perplexed towards panic.

Equally, while Wong deployed the sword on the government’s performance on China, there’s still much tacit bipartisanship.

Surface argy-bargy shouldn’t disguise the broad Coalition–Labor agreement that China is vital. And China is getting harder. And so is America. Plenty of bemusement is mixed into both those bits of bipartisan bedrock.

Policy, Guns and Money: Morrison in the US, UNGA games and contested space

In this episode, Michael Shoebridge offers his thoughts on Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s trip to the United States and the impact it may have had on the Australia–China relationship.

Lisa Sharland and Sarah O’Connor unpack leaders’ week at the United Nations in New York and assess the prime minister’s performance there.

Finally, former ASPI ANU research intern Lauren Hanley returns to chat with Malcolm Davis about contested space and how it relates to the Australian Defence Force.

Morrison’s Forrest Gump moment

Scott Morrison has been touched by Forrest Gump magic.

Come the election, the prime minister went into full Forrest mode: ‘Run, ScoMo, run!’

A federal election is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. Morrison reached into the box and pulled out a miracle allsorts. Proof indeed of Forrest’s view that ‘miracles happen every day’.

When the PM visits Washington in September he’ll get a rare state dinner from Donald Trump, the political equivalent of the medal of honor LBJ gave Gump at the White House (and no jokes, please, about Forrest showing the president the buttocks battle wound).

In the South Pacific, the prime minister has delivered a policy label that’s straight out of the scene where the army sergeant bellows at Forrest: ‘Goddamn it, Gump, you are a goddamn genius!’

Scott Morrison’s embrace of the ‘Pacific family’ is goddamn genius.

The family idea drives his promise that the islands will be front and centre of Australia’s strategic outlook and foreign policy:

We are more than partners by choice. We are connected as members of a Pacific family. It’s why the first leaders I hosted in Australia as prime minister have been from Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. It’s time to open, I believe, a new chapter in relations with our Pacific family.

Come in a moment to the pushback from some intellectual heavy hitters who see dangers in ‘family’. First, savour the genius.

Journos in Canberra spend their lives dogging the detail of what our leaders get wrong. We hacks aren’t programmed to cheer when a leader kicks an inspired bit of politics and diplomacy right through the goal posts. Genius is as genius does, as Forrest would say.

A leader’s magic is to spin a few words into political gold, capturing the moment and proclaiming the future—driving policy and shifting government.

Bumper stickers matter. Leaders have to tell good stories. The minders call it the narrative. If a good story describes great policy as well, run with that Forrest.

In politics, the measure of genius is results. Pacific family has already delivered wins. The new relationship Morrison is building with Fiji is as surprising as it is promising.

Fiji’s Frank Bainimarama has spent much energy since his 2006 coup yelling at Australia and New Zealand, trying to restrict our influence and shut us out. Suva argued for a new regional architecture that wouldn’t be ‘dominated’ by Canberra and Wellington. Fiji has been the revisionist power fighting Australia as the status quo power.

Suddenly, Fiji has embraced Australia as family. The vuvale (family) partnership is a golden gift from Bainimarama. It’s not just a response to Morrison’s cheerful personality. It reveals something about the forces Fiji is feeling—an unease shared by the region.

Like the previous coup leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, Bainimarama sought to escape the clutches of Australia and New Zealand by looking north to Asia. He has had more than a decade to discover the truth that when Beijing says win–win, it expects China to win both ways.

Vuvale is Suva’s offer of a reset and a rebuild with Australia. The vuvale opening suggests Bainimarama now sees more value in Australia’s Pacific role, the weight we offer in balancing an increasingly complex power contest.

Pacific family is a vision carrying lots of questions. Who gets to play dad? And if you twist it hard enough, is family just Oz pushiness or paternalism?

The leading South Pacific scholar Tess Newton Cain told me, ‘The family hook needs to be used sparingly as it’s a double-edged sword in Pacific island countries.  Most recently I heard it described as “a sign that they [Australia] are desperate’’.’ As she has written, family is big talk, and Australia must walk the talk.

Responding to my genius claim, Richard Herr wrote a typically thoughtful piece about who gets to define the family values:

Frequently eulogised by parties of the right for the presumed stability and conservative bias of these values, families are rarely democratic structures.

Family values are inherited rather than constructed. They are passed on from generation to generation by socialising new members into the standards expected of them in ways that are rarely consensual or negotiated …

Whose norms are to prevail as the Pacific family’s values? Will it be the more hierarchically structured values of the Polynesian extended family, the more egalitarian but more fractured social values of Melanesia, or the liberal democratic ideals of Australia?

Even with his cautions, Herr judges: ‘Honorary “family” status is an important indicator of special intimacy that should not be minimised. The implied warmth and inclusiveness should be valued. But care should be taken against accepting it and the obligations of family literally.’

Warmth and inclusiveness matter as much in diplomacy as in heart and hearth.

Family adds emotion and extra commitment into the strategy and geoeconomics. That can change the conversation we have with the islands.

My previous column noted that Australia’s big new ambition for the South Pacific—economic and security integration—has become the policy that can’t be named.

Australia gets a better hearing in the islands when it talks family rather than integration. Yet family and integration are both elements of the new chapter Canberra is trying to write in the South Pacific. The family must take wisdom from the Gumps:

Forrest: What’s my destiny, Mama?

Mrs Gump: You’re gonna have to figure that out for yourself.

Morrison’s congestion-busting mission for the public service

It’s notable that Prime Minister Scott Morrison allocated an additional job to himself in announcing his second ministry last Sunday. This was to make himself minister for the public service. Greg Hunt is named in the new ministry list as ‘Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service and Cabinet’—in effect the cabinet secretary. Previously, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann had been dual-hatted for several years as minister for the public service, and before that Eric Abetz had been minister assisting the prime minister for the public service during Tony Abbott’s prime ministership.

What’s in a name? Quite a lot when it comes to a prime minister signalling a reformist intent to shape the Australian public service (APS). Let’s be clear: Morrison didn’t have to take on this role. A prime minister’s day is already full enough without additional responsibilities. Strong PMs can also choose to reach over the shoulders of ministers to shape any policy area, but direct day-to-day steerage is a different thing. Morrison’s conscious decision to keep his hands on the APS ‘engine room’ of policy capability (and to appoint Hunt to assist him with that) is a significant fact that will have Canberra’s agency heads paying close attention.

What might Morrison’s interest be in the APS—an institution in a territory not naturally thought to be the Coalition’s heartland? Could it be that he understands as John Howard did that the road to policy success for any government runs through the land of the APS? Get the relationship right—which means a respectful and creative interaction around policy—and both government and the APS do well. On the other hand, prime ministers and ministers who develop poor interactions with the public service often find themselves cut apart when the pink batts hit the fan.

So what does Scott Morrison want from the APS? He lost no time getting the department and agency heads together just days after the election—itself a significant and symbolic act—and setting out his expectations. This is how the PM described it to 2GB’s Alan Jones:

I had all the public servants together yesterday in Canberra and told them a couple of important things. One is, their job is not just to do the big things well, but do the little things well, the things that people rely on; returning the phone calls, making sure their services are being delivered, making sure the payments turn up on time.

Jones: Good on you.

Prime minister: All of those sorts of things, but when it comes to the big things it’s about getting these big projects actually happening. I told you and I talked a lot in the campaign about congestion-busting infrastructure. I want a bit of bureaucracy congestion-busting too when it comes to getting a lot of these things going. That’s important for investors who want to invest in Australia and its future, but it’s also important to get these projects delivered on the ground, whether it’s the National Water Grid or whether it’s the East–West Link or whether it’s the Rail Link out there into the Western Sydney Airport.

All of this is important. I’m just keen to get off on the right foot and make sure that these things are being delivered on the ground.

‘Bureaucracy congestion-busting’ suggests some impatience with the public service’s ability to shape imaginative policy agendas quickly. Morrison would hardly be alone in coming to that view. In my recollection, prime ministers Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Abbott all expressed some frustration about not receiving imaginative policy thinking from the APS.

Morrison was also reported in the Canberra Times as saying to the public service heads that there would be a need for more policy effort in regional security:

I think it very important that we continue to focus on the ways we can use our influence and our relationships and build on those relationships in the Indo-Pacific region and with our friends and partners around the world to continue to be a voice of reason and common sense that is focused on the prosperity and the peacefulness in our region for the people of our region.

In his short time as prime minister before the election, it’s clear that Morrison saw a need and an opportunity to lift Australia’s diplomatic, economic and security effort with the Pacific island countries, which ultimately led to the announcement of a PNG–Australia and possibly US naval facility on Manus Island. Under an earlier PM, that Manus outcome might have been described as a ‘captain’s pick’; my understanding is that the idea didn’t surface from within the APS.

In my view it was exactly the right call. We elect the ‘captains’ to make the smart policy choices, after all. But it’s rather embarrassing that, after months of pushing the national security community to come up with lateral thinking on increasing engagement with our Pacific island neighbours, the policy cupboard looked distressingly bare for a government that was demanding more.

So the APS is subtly on notice to do a better job of developing innovative policy thinking for a prime minister wanting to make a mark on the international stage and looking for new ways to do that. The ‘Pacific step-up’ will clearly be a central part of the agenda, but there’s just as much need to do the same for Australia’s relations with Southeast Asia, and especially with Indonesia, where a freshly re-elected Joko Widodo government will be looking for a new start in relations with Canberra; with Europe, including with the UK as it limps on with the sucking wound that is Brexit; and with India, in our bilateral relationship that never quite delivers. Most importantly, Morrison needs to find smarter public language about dealing with China—so as not to be stuck in the supposed bipartisan consensus about Beijing which maintains that if we do and say nothing all will be right with the world.

And sooner rather than later Morrison will meet Donald Trump. The US president is an unusual collection of quirks, but increasingly in control of the administration with few adults left to curb his worst instincts. Trump’s recent reference to Australia’s walk-on role in the Mueller inquiry (Alexander Downer’s lubricated meeting with George Papadopoulos at a London wine bar in 2016) could be a niggle in the relationship if Morrison doesn’t shift the discussion onto more positive territory—like getting the government policy and regulatory settings right to supercharge private-sector investments in each other’s infrastructure and science and technology sectors: great for our economies and for our security.

Governments send the APS demand signals for what they want on the policy menu. Morrison’s decision to put himself directly in charge of the public service is as clear a signal as he could send about his interest in seeing more innovative policy offerings—and better delivery of the programs flowing from those policies—from an institution that hasn’t been pressed hard on policy creativity in quite some time. Morrison’s Cabinet colleagues will also reflect that the weight will be on them to deliver to this agenda as well.

Three realities for the Pacific family and Australia’s step-up agenda

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is following through on his commitments to Pacific leaders announced around last year’s APEC meeting, and packaged as Australia’s ‘Pacific step-up’. It’s great that his first visit overseas is to Solomon Islands, because walking the talk matters in the Pacific.

On top of this, his new ministry announced on the weekend includes the promotion of Alex Hawke to the double-hatted role of minister for international development and assistant defence minister.

That’s a smart recognition of how the world works—security and economic development are intermingled issues, not separate activities. So it makes sense for a minister whose job is working with Australia’s Pacific partners to also have a role in Australia’s security and defence policy and relationships.

This puts the Morrison government in a strong position to be sincere and open in its engagement with the rest of the Pacific family—whether New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji or the other Pacific Island Forum members. To do that, though, government ministers and officials will need to say some things publicly in the Pacific that they have, until now, been reluctant to say here at home.

His visit to the newly elected Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare gives Morrison a place to try out the foundations of his government’s approach over the next three years. He could start by grounding it in three simple realities.

The first Pacific reality is shared aspiration: Australia, along with New Zealand, genuinely wants its Pacific neighbours to prosper and succeed as peoples and states. We care about our neighbours because we have a shared future with them.

This is a product of geography, history and connections. As is the case with many families, that history is complicated and—occasionally—tainted. Still, what matters to the people and governments of the Pacific matters to us, in a way that’s simply not true for more distant powers. That’s a unique basis for us to work together.

The second reality is that our Pacific partners have urgent needs, as last year’s Pacific Islands Forum clearly expressed. There are enormous, persistent economic, environmental and social challenges. And there’s the existential human security challenge of climate change, which Pacific island leaders pointedly put at the heart of the 2018 Boe Declaration, saying, ‘We reaffirm that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement’.

The new Morrison government, and Alex Hawke in particular, need to show they are listening to and acting on this voice from the Pacific to have credibility in building on the Pacific step-up.

Listening could be given real momentum by Morrison funding a public broadcasting voice for the Pacific. Around $75 million a year would buy a broad two-way channel allowing Australian voices to be heard in the Pacific and Pacific views and voices to feed into internal Australian debates.

And, as well as listening, as Graeme Dobell has observed, they need to craft, communicate and—most importantly—invest in the long-term vision of Pacific states’ economic, social and security integration with Australia and New Zealand, at a pace and in a way that leaders and their societies help determine.

The last Pacific reality that leaders will need to hear from visiting Australian ministers and officials is about the Chinese state’s activities and presence in the Pacific. Insincerity detectors are highly developed in all Pacific Islands Forum member states, so talking points that are all about the positives of Chinese engagement—both in Australia and in the region—just won’t cut the mustard.

There’s an emerging confidence in the Australian debate to speak openly about the negative aspects of how President Xi Jinping’s ruling Chinese Communist Party is using its authoritarian power. This is about the CCP’s use of military power in places like the South China Sea; its use of internal security power in Xinjiang through mass surveillance and arbitrary imprisonment; its use of cyber power in stealing state and company secrets; its isolation and threatening of the 24-million-person democracy of Taiwan with military invasion; and its funded and organised approach to covert interference in the politics of other nations. This is all about the actions and policies of the ruling CCP, not the Chinese economy or society.

Talking with Pacific leaders about this ‘dark side’ of dealing with China will add a note of realism and trust to our work together. And that’s important because small Pacific states are not the objects of altruism by the Chinese state; they are on the receiving end of the same kinds of policies and manoeuvres that Australia is managing and responding to.

And while Australia continues to benefit from mutual trade with the Chinese economy, our government and institutions are finding it necessary to strengthen our ‘national immune system’ to cope with the dark side of the Chinese state, so that our engagement is healthy.

That’s a discussion that our Pacific partners will welcome, as they too will face these same challenges in dealing with the CCP’s use of power—and like us, having company as they do so will be essential.

As in all areas of foreign policy and national security, it will help Australia’s case greatly for this approach to be a bipartisan one. As Anthony Albanese forms his opposition ministry, let’s hope that he too sees the value in being able to engage simply and openly on security and economics with our Pacific partners. A shared view on the three Pacific realities would be a start.

Australia’s election silences show need for mandatory debates

Elections are debates in quest of power. But Australia is poorly served by the lack of a formal debate structure during federal elections.

The campaign, just done and dusted, was sad proof—yet again—that Australia’s major political parties can’t be relied on to deliver face-to-face debates.

The Liberal and Labor parties give lip service to debates. Too often, though, their lips are sealed when it comes to formal face-offs.

In the political fight for power, the two parties aren’t interested in having to explain themselves on stages they don’t control.

The leaders and apparatchiks view debates as high risk. Governments abhor formats that give equal status to the opposition. The party in the lead fears mishaps, while the trailing party clamours for as much attention as it can get.

The reality is that the parties have veto power over format and frequency and forum.

In the 2019 election, the Liberal and Labor parties limited the number of debates between the leaders and killed debates between ministers and shadow ministers in most key portfolios.

Australia saw no debates on foreign affairs or defence. Zip. Zero. Zounds! This is astounding and appalling. This is system failure delivered by our politics in the service of narrow party interest, at the expense of national purpose.

The habit in recent elections has been for separate defence and foreign affairs debates, between the minister and shadow minister, at the National Press Club (NPC) in Canberra. This time, zip.

To get an idea of what you missed, see my columns on the NPC’s foreign and defence debates in the 2016 election.

The 2016 defence debate was calm and agreeable in tone, demonstrating, as Labor’s shadow minister Stephen Conroy said, ‘an overwhelming degree of bipartisanship’—except on China.

The 2016 foreign affairs face-off started with the South China Sea and ended on China’s suppression of internal dissent. Wouldn’t you have savoured a rerun of those questions this time? If you wanted to be a lot kinder to the parties than I’m prepared to be, perhaps they just didn’t want to talk about China.

For my favourite NPC pre-election moment, come back to the 2010 foreign affairs debate, when shadow foreign minister Julie Bishop was staving off questions about the multilateral scepticism of the Liberal leader, Tony Abbott. My version of the Abbott chant was ‘bilateralism good, multilateralism bad’, and Bishop—in a moment of exasperation spiced with humour—snapped that the Liberals weren’t actually arguing that Australia should withdraw from the United Nations.

Labor’s foreign minister in that 2010 debate, Stephen Smith, said the NPC served up the first China question he’d got in the campaign. Oh, happy days. Or daze?

Another feature of the 2010 debate was the Labor–Liberal ‘golden consensus on aid’, with both sides happily promising lots more aid gold, doubling the annual amount to $8–10 billion. It was a time long ago, in a universe far from here.

In this year’s campaign, the NPC pushed hard for a series of debates, seeking to entrench recent habit and make it established tradition. Alas, most of the debates the NPC proposed came to zip.

The no-show failures happened because parties wouldn’t agree and ministers and shadow ministers wouldn’t front up.

NPC debates that didn’t happen were on defence, foreign affairs, immigration, environment, energy, finance, industrial relations and northern Australia.

The three debates that did happen were on treasury, health and agriculture. Plus one leaders’ debate, with the interviewing done by NPC president, the ABC’s Sabra Lane.

Lane’s concluding question to Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten was whether they’d support the creation of an ‘independent debates commission’. The Labor and Liberal leaders gave identical one-word answers: ‘Yes.’

Treat that agreement as equivocal evasion—fudge, not commitment.

Australia needs to create a federal election debates commission.

We can’t rely on the two parties of government to make it happen. It’ll need a lot of pushing from minor parties doing keeping-them-honest duty, the parliamentary press gallery and the NPC. As the national broadcaster, the ABC should push the idea. So should SBS. Then enlist the great and the good to demand it happens.

The Liberal and Labor leaders said yes when put on the spot. Make ’em deliver.

The way the big parties treat debates as dangers to be minimised short-changes Australia. If the parties took their eyes off tactical push and shove, they’d notice that debate aversion harms their larger interests.

The parties are confounded that millions of Australians don’t wait for the big campaign launches and promises, and do lodge a postal or absentee vote in the three weeks before polling day. Voter cynicism about politics is feeding campaign apathy—and vice versa.

A series of debates rolling through an election campaign would offer voters a reason to pay sustained attention.

During a four-week campaign, there should be four leaders’ debates—every Wednesday, for instance. Each week there should be portfolio debates; the press club’s list would be a good starting place.

Aim for a firm schedule of four leaders’ debates and eight to 10 portfolio debates.

The independent commission, established by parliament, would set the debate formats and rules, then step back from the fray. Send the journos in to lob the questions.

It’s risible that in the 2019 campaign, the first two leaders’ debates were on the media platforms of a minor sport. The first debate, in Perth, was run on the Seven Network’s secondary free-to-air channel. The second debate, dubbed a ‘people’s forum’, was even more niche; to see that, you needed to have access to Foxtel’s Sky News Australia.

Set up a federal election debates commission to ensure every Australian has instant access to what should be a permanent, scheduled element of every federal election.

Morrison’s shipbuilding announcements are about more than jobs

Yesterday from the election campaign trail in Western Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison made some naval shipbuilding announcements relating to the Royal Australian Navy’s mine-clearing and hydrographic capabilities. Speaking from the Henderson shipyard south of Perth, he announced that more ships would be built in … Henderson. After the recent twisted history of our future submarine project, the media and public might be forgiven for suspecting that this is a vote-grabbing exercise in pork-barrelling. So let’s unpack what’s new here, what’s already in the works and, more importantly, what’s actually a good idea.

First, there is nothing new in the plan to build a hydrographic vessel at Henderson. The Department of Defence has the responsibility of providing hydrographic services for the nation, although it has not necessarily always met the nation’s demand for such services. The 2016 defence white paper (page 93) and its supporting integrated investment program (page 88) said that Defence would replace its current hydrographic capability with a combination of military and commercial elements from the early 2020s. Essentially it would outsource the routine national support tasks to better meet public demand, and keep the specialised military functions in house.

The 2017 naval shipbuilding plan (pages 38–39) elaborated on this, stating that a vessel for ‘strategic’ military hydrography would be built as part of the continuous minor war vessel program (which is centred on Henderson in Western Australia) and be delivered in the mid-2020s. The prime minister’s statement that construction of that vessel would commence in the early 2020s is completely consistent with that plan.

So it’s not new. And it’s actually a good idea. The commercial surveying sector can do the routine tasks more cost-effectively, so it is better for Defence to focus on the difficult and dangerous hydrographic missions such as supporting submarine or amphibious operations in unfriendly waters. Making sure Defence retains sufficient critical mass in skilled personnel will be the challenge here, not building the ship.

The developments in the mine countermeasure space, however, are actually new, and, more importantly, they’re also a good thing—but that’s got little to do with shipbuilding jobs. Defence currently operates four manned minehunters (down from six after two were retired early as a cost saving). These vessels perform mine clearance the traditional way—by going into the minefield. That means they are specialised vessels made of fibreglass so they don’t set off mines and are designed to be extremely shock-proof in case they do. It’s still dangerous. They’re also slow, and they’re designed to clear domestic ports rather than deploy with rapidly moving naval or amphibious task forces.

Like many militaries, the ADF has been experimenting with unmanned, more-or-less autonomous systems for mine hunting, so that humans can sit outside the minefield and send drones in to do the dull, dirty and dangerous work. These systems can potentially be operated from any ‘vessel of opportunity’, so we wouldn’t need specialised minehunters anymore. They could be operated from an amphibious vessel, or an offshore patrol vessel, for instance, that was part of the deployed task force.

In fact, back in the 2009 white paper (page 73), this was meant to be the future concept. Defence would build a one-size-fits-all minor war vessel that would do maritime patrol and border protection tasks as well as host mine clearance and even hydrographic teams when necessary.

However, the autonomous technology didn’t seem to be maturing quickly, so Defence went back to the safe path of upgrading the minehunters and extending their lives out to the early 2030s, so they wouldn’t be replaced until then. But the complexity of the vessels made the upgrade very expensive—$1–2 billion, according to the integrated investment program (page 90).

But the technology then matured faster than expected. What exactly was the capability shortfall in unmanned autonomous systems? What could humans do that they couldn’t? And did it warrant sending humans into the minefield? The answer essentially came down to trust. Autonomous systems could do the job (or increasingly more of it, at least). And for many tasks that required routine and repetition, they could do it better. But we still didn’t trust them. Ultimately, we want a human to assure us that that stretch of water is clear of mines before we sail through.

But Defence, through continuous experimentation with unmanned systems in exercises such as Autonomous Warrior, has developed familiarity with the technology—and, rather than contempt, familiarity builds trust. Just think of your own reliance now on your mobile phone for navigation. So, in the mine clearance space at least, autonomous systems have now cleared the trust bar.

The details of the new strategy and the project to deliver it (SEA 1905, according to the prime minister) aren’t public, highlighting again the need for an updated public integrated investment plan. From the capability perspective, the two new ‘mine warfare support vessels’ to be built at Henderson aren’t the most important part of the system. What they will look like is a little irrelevant (probably something a lot like the offshore patrol vessels just starting construction). The key point is that instead of spending $1–2 billion on extending the life of an outdated concept, Defence is embracing the new, retiring the old minehunters and adopting a solution based on autonomous systems. For this, it should be commended.

The question is, how far is Defence willing to go down the path of autonomous systems? And when? In contrast to its mine-clearance capability, in surface combatants and submarines it is doubling down on exquisitely capable, yet exquisitely expensive, manned vessels that consume its capital budget but won’t deliver anything for more than a decade, potentially into a world swarming with autonomous systems and weapons designed to destroy those high-value platforms.

When will Defence trust autonomous systems enough to move away from manned platforms in those areas, or at least adopt autonomous systems that complement and protect those traditional platforms? It will be interesting to see how its experiment in the mine warfare space shapes its appetite to innovate and embrace risk in other areas of warfare.