Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Opening plenary - Challenging the neo-liberal danger
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Andrew Wilkie

Former intelligence officer and author

I have less than 10 minutes to talk about national security policy. Not much time, but all that’s needed to state the blinding obvious - that the Australian Government has failed, and continues to fail, in its fundamental responsibility to safeguard Australians and Australia’s national interests.

And the main reason for this, the simple reason why the Government has lost control of our national security, is that the Government generally, and Prime Minister John Howard specifically, is obsessed to the point of blindness with the lunatic administration of US President George W. Bush.

This infatuation contaminates almost everything to do with our security and foreign relations. At home in particular the mood is increasingly hysterical as the Government, assisted enthusiastically at every turn by Murdoch’s media odd-balls, feed us more and more of that extraordinary American invention, the so-called war on terror. Don’t mind that the very idea of a war on an operational technique is nonsensical from the start; or that the war’s 11 September 2001 New York origin was an understandable extremist response to US Middle East policy, in particular the unnecessarily massive and long-term US military presence in Saudi Arabia.

But Australia’s ride on the war on terror is just the start of it, because the deep policy corruption brought about by Canberra’s fawning approach to Washington has now got into just about everything.

At the most fundamental level, Australia’s policy-making process is closely tuned to US national interests and desires. In effect, the Australian Government sometimes relegates Canberra policy departments to second fiddle, preferring instead to let the big decisions be made in Washington. Sure we haven’t outsourced everything but, like a good child looking to its mother, any serious disobedience is not risked lightly.

That is why we are in Iraq. That is why we are heading back to Afghanistan. That is why we don’t care much about Africa. That is why we think the way we do about North Korea. And that is exactly why we are careering toward perilous choices over China as our ideological obsession with the US becomes more apparently at odds with our long-term economic interests.

As a consequence our armoury and force structure is being slowly but surely skewed towards heavier, more expensive and sophisticated forces better suited to expeditionary coalition manoeuvres than local defensive operations or UN assignments further afield. Hence we are buying bigger armoured vehicles, larger amphibious warfare ships, air warfare vessels and highly sophisticated fighter aircraft.

I’m definitely not saying that we should do away with our defence force or run it down so that our soldiers are endangered. Shutting it down is unrealistic for now; especially so long as incompetent politicians so regularly create the circumstances where the unfortunate use of force is called for, for instance in East Timor. What I am saying is that our troops should be structured and equipped for the defence of Australia and appropriate multi-lateral operations. No more, no less. And that is a long way from the style of armed force which our government, and others like Labor Party Opposition Leader Kim Beazley, tend to get so excited about.

Unnecessary defence expenditure obviously costs a huge amount of money, money which just as obviously could be spent on more pressing problems. For example, the Defence Department’s annual miss-spends and under-spends, accumulated over just the most recent few years, totalling not hundreds of millions of dollars but billions, would be enough to fast-track Australia towards substantial reliance on renewable energy, or dramatically increase our foreign aid, or windback HECS fees, or fully fund dental care as part of Medicare.

More worrying than financial recklessness in the short term though - and I say short term, because obviously climate change is the greatest long-term threat to global security - is the way in which John Howard’s cosy relationship with George Bush has fuelled resentment against Australia and significantly increased the likelihood of another terrorist strike against Australians either here or offshore.

In essence, our closeness to the US will continue to fuel resentment that in its most extreme form will sooner or later manifest itself again as terrorism. There’s nothing complex about this. Regardless of whether or not we were ever a terrorist target or would ever have become one, the simple fact of the matter is that the Howard government’s policies since 9/11 have unnecessarily increased the hatred of Australia in some quarters and so increased the likelihood of another terrorist attack.

And all John Howard can say much of the time when challenged on this is that the New York and Bali attacks were before the invasion of Iraq, and that this proves that they hate us for who we are, not what we do. Someone, anyone, really should pipe up the next time he replays that nonsense to point out what Howard knows - that Osama bin Laden’s original gripe was the stationing of US forces in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s. In other words, the origin of al Qaida is what the US did, not what it was.

Unfortunately though too many Australian’s still remain oblivious to all this, persuaded instead that what we do, and who we do it with, are unrelated to the terrorist threat we now face. They read trash like the Herald Sun, The Australian, or Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, and blindly go about their selfish and xenophobic lives believing genuinely that Australia has no choice but to follow America. “We need the Americans to protect us from the Chinese”, my 80 year old mother reassured me again just two weeks ago.

Moreover many Australians believe also that we are now seriously contributing to the pacification and rebuilding of both Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind the facts that Australian forces in Iraq have become a laughing stock with some American commanders because the Diggers are forbidden from doing anything much dangerous - the heavy lifting as John Howard might say. Or that in Afghanistan our new team will, once the top-heavy command structure and need for troop rest is taken into account, manage to put only a few dozen frontline soldiers into the field at any one time.

Of course none of this, or much else about Australia’s war for that matter, is going to get much of a run in the Australian media, in particular amongst Rupert Murdoch’s angry mob. Everyone’s too worried about appearing un-Australian by seriously questioning what exactly the job is that our soldiers are trying to finish over there.

Even the media outlets that do try to scrutinise this absurd war on terror are hamstrung by the shortage of decent Australian commentators. Take the recent London bombings, for example, when one of the television news services rolled out “Australia’s leading terrorism expert” who proudly predicted that the bombers would be found to be Moroccan. Or in one of the big dailies where a high-profile columnist claimed that the head of Monash University’s Terrorism Project, a former senior terrorism intelligence analyst, did not understand terrorism.

So things are obviously crook when it comes to Australian national security and foreign relations. In essence, the Howard government has lost control and many Australians haven’t got a clue. Just great. And all this at a time when Australia does face serious challenges, many of its own making of course, and needs to be better equipped than ever to deal with them.

But don’t count on our public servants to bail us out. The competent security services are stretched and wearing out as they continue to be distracted by the grinding Iraq misadventure; while the incompetent ones are spending their time on such worthwhile missions as investigating why Melbourne PhD students studying terrorism are taking terrorism-related books out of their university library. Nor are the bureaucrats much help, their top levels now heavily politicised, focussed much more on telling the government what it wants to hear, than what it needs to hear.

In closing I’d like to note another obvious - that there’s little value in just criticising the way things are, unless our criticism is accompanied by good ideas for improvement.

For a start we should pull back from the US. Sure we might chose to foster appropriate bilateral and multilateral relationships with some countries, but these must not be at the expense of giving primacy to the development of independent foreign policies based on Australia’s national interests. A good start would be to shut down bases like Pine Gap unless they are turned over in their entirety to Australian operators.

We should also seek to genuinely re-engage with the broader international community, in particular in our region where apparent progress with countries like Indonesia and Malaysia is thin. This is where our future lies and where our security efforts must be focussed. Remember that the Bali bombers were Indonesians, young men born in a place closer to Darwin than Sydney.

Moreover we must rebuild our position in the United Nations and start respecting international law. The illegal invasion of Iraq was obviously scandalous. But just as outrageous is the government’s continuing determination to ignore our Refugee Convention obligations.

Also, we must become serious about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, starting with the strongest possible protest over Washington’s determination to develop a new generation of bombs.

And finally, we must get serious about the biggest threat to our security - climate change. Because, when it’s all said and done, that’s the thing most likely to destroy humankind as we know it.

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