The inquiry’s head, acting justice Robert Hulme, this week found “a reasonable doubt” about the guilt of three of the six — Ilija Kokotovic, Joseph Kokotovic and Mile Nekic. Hulme referred his findings to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, which will now consider whether their convictions should be quashed. But he declined to question the convictions of the other three — Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Maksimilian Bebic and Anton Zvirotic — each of whom continues to protest their innocence more than twenty years after being released from jail.

The six men, all young tradies in Sydney and Lithgow at the time, were arrested on 8 February 1979 after a seventh man calling himself Vico Virkez contacted state police. Virkez told them he had become embroiled in a Croatian nationalist bomb plot against Yugoslavia’s communist government and wanted to expose it before harm was done. Police raids followed, leading to one of the longest criminal trials in British Commonwealth history and the six men’s conviction in February 1981. Each was sentenced to fifteen years’ jail and served seven to eight years before being paroled.

Gradually, though, an alternative scenario began building up. According to this version, Virkez was actually a Serb named Vitomir Misimovic, masquerading as a Croat, who had accumulated a stash of stolen gelignite in Lithgow with his gullible housemate Bebic. Once he told police that bombs were about to be set across Sydney, the state’s police heavies, the Criminal Investigation Bureau, employed their notorious methods — bashing, verballing and “loading-up” — to frame six Croatian activists irking the Tito regime.

Two applications for judicial review of the convictions, in 1994 and 2013, failed. Then the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation declassified records of phone taps showing Virkez had been communicating with an officer of the Yugoslav intelligence service, the UDBa, at the Yugoslav consulate in Sydney during the six months before the arrests.

A third bid for review was then accepted by the NSW Supreme Court, with Hulme appointed to run it. He heard evidence and submissions for almost a year, with legal teams representing the NSW Police, individual police, the state’s prosecutors, ASIO and of course the six convicted men. More than twenty police officers were brought out of retirement and quizzed about the evidence they gave all that time ago.

Hulme has digested the massive trove of transcripts, exhibits and subpoenaed documents and now, fifteen months later, has published a cautious 543-page report and a similar-sized volume of annexures. Having followed the campaign for the men’s exoneration for nearly twenty years, I was puzzled by some of his assessments — especially on the question of ASIO’s role in a likely miscarriage of justice — and the weight he has given to certain testimony.

Hulme was not inclined to entertain the alternative narrative as a whole. He finds the main part of the evidence given by Virkez, who had turned crown witness for the trial and been given a short sentence, to be credible despite Virkez’s having told the ABC’s Chris Masters on camera in 1991 that he made most of it up — an admission he later repeated to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough. Virkez returned to Yugoslavia after giving evidence, without punishment by its authorities, and died in 2014.

The judge likewise accepts the testimony of the then federal police intelligence official Roger Cavanagh, who flits in and out of the investigation as a specialist on threats from the Croatian extremist Ustaše organisation and other anti-Yugoslavian groups. Cavanagh played down the connection between Virkez and the Yugoslav intelligence service in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, portraying  Virkez as a voluntary informant rather than an agent.

“The evidence does not support the contention that Virkez held considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations and activists and thereby had a motive to frame Croatian people, or to engineer a false flag style operation adverse to their interests,” Hulme found. The judge did not address the evidence that Virkez did indeed hold considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations, nor his animus towards one of the Croatian Six in particular, Vjekoslav Brajkovic.

The allegation that Virkez “played or held a higher role, such as an ‘agent provocateur’ either in the traditional or confined sense, cannot be sustained,” writes Hulme. “In his role with the Yugoslav consulate, Virkez is best described as an ‘informant’ or ‘source.’ If he is to be considered any sort of ‘agent,’ the qualifying term used by Cavanagh of ‘low-level’ is apt.”

Hulme grants that Virkez “remains a controversial character and there is a lot that remains unknown or is unclear about his background.” And he concedes that Virkez was not truthful in all respects of his trial evidence, for example when he denied he was in contact with the consulate for the purpose of spying on Croatians. But on the “core subject” of the bombing conspiracy, Hulme concludes that Virkez’s account was supported by the call he made to the consulate just before tipping off the NSW police. “The call was, in effect, a plea for help and advice; he said, ‘I am in some sort of trouble,’” he writes.

The judge argues that his evidence is “not in any way tarnished by the claims made by Virkez many years later in interviews with Masters and McGeough, two highly respected journalists who tracked him down in his native country. While those claims provided support at a superficial level for the petitioners’ case, they are replete with inaccuracies and inconsistencies that deny them credibility.”

This interpretation of Virkez’s behaviour is similar to that of the prosecution in the trial. It hardly accords with the more widely accepted picture of Virkez as a malign, cynical character who sprung a trap on his gullible housemate Bebic and the other Croatians while his delighted UDba handlers looked on from a safe distance.

Cavanagh, long retired, died in 2021 before the inquiry hearings began. Curiously, the Australian Federal Police were not represented at the inquiry, and no attempt seems to have been made to seek any records it (or its predecessor, the Commonwealth Police) might have on Virkez. Maybe Hulme had no power to call them. In one interview, Virkez said he had been in contact with “ASIO” and told to speak to a “Kavanagh.” Had Cavanagh been running Virkez as a source himself? It’s an intriguing thought.

Nor did Hulme take up the contention of the lawyers for the Croatian Six that the Wood royal commission’s 1994 finding that systemic “process corruption” existed in the CIB squads brought into question all the police evidence in this case, notably the alleged discovery of gelignite in Sydney homes and the “admissions” some of the accused allegedly made to the CIB after their arrest.

The only way for such a conspiracy to be proven would be if any of the surviving police admitted to have taken part in or known about it. But the legislation setting up this kind of judicial inquiry notably excludes the power of royal commissions and certain other types of inquiry to compel testimony and grant legal immunity in exchange. Hulme said he asked the NSW government during the inquiry for a legislative patch to fix this gap, but without success. “It cannot be known whether the exclusion of the power of compulsion did in fact work to conceal such evidence,” he said.

Hulme did find several police officers involved in Brajkovic’s arrest had severely bashed him, one using a twisted towel to throttle him, and had then conspired to mislead an Internal Affairs Branch inquiry into Brajkovic’s complaint. (The branch accepted the officers’ concocted explanation for his injuries: that he, with help from other accused, had inflicted injuries on himself to discredit police.)

Nor did the police take proper precautions for the potential discovery of massive amounts of explosives in their raids. “Indeed, by today’s standards, the nonchalant way police acted on intelligence that there might be ‘30–50kg of explosives at an undisclosed location’ was rather extraordinary,” Hulme said. “However, the inquiry does not find the inadequate or complete lack of precautions to mean that police had formulated a conspiracy to falsely accuse the Croatian Six before any raids were carried out, knowing that there was no real bomb plot. Instead, more probable is the explanation that the lack of precautions ‘was in all likelihood a product of a cavalier attitude that prevailed at the time and nothing more sinister.’”

Hulme was highly critical of Special Branch officer Victor Jefferies for withholding his knowledge of Virkez’s Serb background and Virkez’s anti-Croatian views, and for endeavouring to keep his Yugoslav consulate link hidden from the committal hearings of the charges against the Croatian Six.

He dismisses for lack of evidence the conjecture that the two half-sticks of gelignite (and associated wiring and detonators) found in each of three Sydney homes raided by separate police groups came from a “stash” of incriminating items kept by the CIB squads to “load up” suspects.

But when he discusses the convictions of the Kokotovic brothers and Nekic — arrested at the same house with sticks of gelignite on a desk at which they were preparing leaflets, according to police — he finds it unclear who possessed the incriminating items. He considers their alleged admissions of joint possession in the CIB “interviews” to be concerning. Together with the sketchy references to them by Virkez and Bebic in Lithgow, he concludes that reasonable doubt exists about their convictions.

It is when he turns to the main new evidence that led to the inquiry — the evidence of ASIO involvement — that Hulme leaves a huge gap in accountability.

ASIO records declassified in 2018 reveal that the security service was tapping telephones at the Yugoslav consulate and monitoring Virkez’s contacts with UDba. Soon after the arrests in February 1979, a secret report was circulated by its head office in Canberra. Virkez, it said, had “for a period of at least six months prior to the arrests acted as an informer on Croatian nationalist activities to a person suspected by ASIO of being an intelligence official attached to the Yugoslav Consulate-General.” The plot revealed “the depth of the penetration of Croatian extremist groups by the YIS in Australia.”

This report went to top NSW police and the Special Branch. In follow-up exchanges with ASIO, then assistant police commissioner Roy Whitelaw said “if the opposition [ie the six men’s defence team] became aware of this information it could blow a hole right through the police case.” Later Whitelaw was advised he could tell his prosecutors about it as long as the source was not made public. Through the trial and appeal, defence subpoenas for relevant intelligence information about Virkez were rejected on national security and other grounds.

As a result, the crown prosecutor, the late David Shillington QC, was able to assert, unchallenged, that there was “not a skerrick of evidence to suggest that [Virkez] was some sort of undercover agent, an UDBa or Yugoslav representative.”

Hulme’s inquiry tried to find out whether ASIO’s information had got to Shillington. Various surviving police witness said he was fully informed about everything he should know. Hulme declines to accuse him of knowingly withholding evidence important to the defence: “[I]t would be neither fair to the late Mr Shillington QC, nor reasonably supported by the evidence before the inquiry, to conclude that he abdicated his responsibilities and acted in a manner inconsistent with his overarching duty.”

The judge noted that when the Croatian Six sought leave to appeal in the High Court in 1986, the then NSW crown counsel, Reg Blanch QC (later chief judge of the NSW District Court), admitted that if the prosecution had withheld vital evidence for the defence “it would be almost automatic that there would be a miscarriage of justice.”

Hulme’s own counsel assisting submitted that the defect in the trial process by reason of non-disclosure was significant. In his finding, Hulme conceded that the nondisclosure “could meet the current day test for a miscarriage of justice in that it could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict,” helpfully citing a recent case.

“However,” Hume went on, “the ultimate question for the inquiry is whether there is reasonable doubt as to guilt of the Croatian Six. A flaw in the trial processes is an appropriate matter to report upon and might inform this question, but it is not in itself determinative… The unavailability to the defence of information and evidence concerning Virkez’s allegiance to Yugoslavian interests and his association with personnel at the Yugoslav consulate has no impact upon the question of whether there is a reasonable doubt about the guilt of any of the members of the Croatian Six.”

Hulme circled the subject again in his conclusion, where he referred to “failings” in the disclosure of information about Virkez’s association with the Yugoslav consulate and loyalty to Yugoslavia. “The extent of what was known and should have been passed on is not entirely clear,” he wrote, “but there is no doubt that there was a denial of some probative ‘ammunition’ that could have been effectively deployed in cross-examination of Virkez.”

This non-disclosure, he went on, “arguably was significant and could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict and thereby constitute a miscarriage of justice.” He repeated his reference to a recent High Court ruling to this effect.

It is puzzling that Justice Hulme didn’t consider the question of a miscarriage of justice to be within the ambit of his inquiry. After all these years, exactly whose task is it? That question must surely be considered by the two authorities to whom he has given his report: NSW chief justice Andrew Bell and NSW governor Margaret Beazley (herself a former president of the NSW Court of Appeal).

The procedures drag on. Of the three exonerated, Mile Nekic has died and the Kokotovic brothers didn’t seek this inquiry. A ruling that a miscarriage of justice did indeed occur would bring a sort of exoneration for the other three, and for the broader Croatian-Australian community, which has had to live with the stain of terrorism this case has spread over them for nearly five decades. •

► Hamish McDonald’s account of his involvement in the successful effort to reopen the case

The post The Croatian Six inquiry raises more reasonable doubts appeared first on Inside Story.

When Donald Trump went to Beijing last month he didn’t have to bend the knee, at least literally, to Chinese president Xi Jinping, as Macartney had to Qianlong. But the American president’s visit had echoes of that 1793 mission. Trump was the importunate barbarian, Xi the aloof possessor of all the advantages. Trump was effusive in his praise of Xi, who reciprocated in stiffly formal terms.

For the United States, the export pay-off was desultory: just the usual Chinese purchases of soy bean for its pigs and Boeing jets for its airlines. Hard questions about tariffs, semiconductors and rare elements were passed to new bilateral trade and investment boards. Xi offered no help with Iran.

In return for these meagre results, Trump bowed to China on two fronts. One was to concede equal status in world affairs, at least in the economic sphere. The other was to cross a bipartisan line on Taiwan, to some alarm in both Taipei and Washington.

In the first case, Trump agreed to Xi’s concept of a “constructive relationship of strategic stability.” Xi expressed the hope this would “transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations.” (The reference was to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who recorded Sparta’s fatal effort to thwart the rise of Athens.)

If Trump understood and agreed, he seems to have willingly committed America to accepting that China is here to stay as a great power and abandoned any hope of squashing its strategic ambitions. The concession builds on the G2 (Group of Two) concept Trump and his team took away from their meeting with Xi in South Korea last October, a concept that alarmed America’s China hawks and some US allies as an implicit retreat from US “primacy” in the Western Pacific. Not only are many Americans unsettled but the Chinese and their neighbours in Asian are trying to deconstruct Xi’s words and Trump’s response.

A survey of Chinese-language commentary published in Sinification, an independent American newsletter that translates and unpicks policy debates within China, gives an insight into how Chinese analysts see the visit and its aftermath.

According to initial analysis at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, an arm of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, the Trum-Xi meeting puts US–China rivalry in “a new phase of strategic stalemate” — though it still needs careful attention to avoid “capsizes.” Another analyst under the State Security umbrella, Zhang Jian, sees May’s successive visits by Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin as signs China was becoming a key “connecting point” in the emerging multipolar world.

Zhao Minghao of Shanghai’s Fudan University sees Trump’s willingness to accept “constructive strategic stability” as an important adjustment on the American side, demonstrating that flexible realism had become the foreign-policy principle US president favoured. America specialists Da Wei and Zhou Wuhua at Beijing’s Tsinghua University merge the concepts of the G2 and multipolarity into a “dual-core multipolar order” with China and the United States as the key players but middle powers having the space to hedge selectively between them, avoiding the hardening of cold war–style blocs.

But others see America aiming to hold on to the commanding heights in a new global economy. Among them is the Shanghai Development Research Foundation’s Jia Min, who dismisses the notion of “the East rising and the West declining” and points to the United States entering a new cycle driven by artificial intelligence. Far from having retreated from the globe, says Jia, the US has grown more flexible, more strategically attuned and more expansionary.

Di Dongsheng and Ji Xianbai at Beijing’s Renmin University argue that an emerging “techno-industrial complex” is driving the United States to abandon free-market orthodoxy for state-led industrial policy, civil–military fusion and resistance to regulation. This digital-age heir to the military–industrial complex would fuse big tech, the national-security state and venture capital into a single-interest bloc.

As the line between public power and tech capital blurs, Di and Ji expect the big technology companies’ grip on Washington to intensify. The increasingly powerful data and AI company Palantir has already shown how government contracts, revenue and valuation could rise together. Abroad, this techno-industrial complex is harvesting “war dividends” in the Ukraine, Gaza and Iran conflicts while using “small yard, high fence” containment to preserve American technological hegemony.

Even some of the optimists think that constructive stability can quickly be upset. “Since Washington’s overarching goal of strategic competition with China is unchanged,” writes Peking University’s Jia Qingguo, “relevant US government departments are still likely to roll out policies that Beijing reads as confrontational, thereby undermining the stability of the relationship.”

Contrasting with those mixed views, China’s strategic analysts have generally been cheered by remarks Trump made about Taiwan immediately after his talks with Xi. The Chinese leader had warned of “clashes and even conflicts” if the US and Taiwan began overtly asserting the island’s independence.

Trump’s response was to tell Fox News he was holding back a US$14 billion package of arms exports to Taiwan, comprising missiles, anti-drone defences and a powerful air defence command system. The arms deal is “a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said, without making clear what he would be seeking from the Chinese in return for withholding the weaponry. “It’s a lot of weapons,” he added.

Using arms sales to Taiwan in talks with China would cross a red line laid down by president Ronald Reagan in 1982 as part of his “Six Assurances.” His administration had transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 and was seeking to maintain stability in the region.

Trump also took an implicit swipe at Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-tei, whose Democratic Progressive Party has been arguing Taiwan is effectively independent of the mainland while retaining a formally status as part of a Republic of China. Trump said the US remained neutral on Taiwan’s position, but added: “I will say this: I’m not looking to have somebody go independent. And, you know, we’re supposed to travel 9500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down.”

Trump’s remarks have caused deep unease in Washington, among opponents and Republicans alike, as well as in allied capitals. “The net effect of his comments,” says the Brookings Institute’s Ryan Hass, “was to suggest that his views on Taiwan independence were closer to Beijing’s preferences, that Taiwan had a greater responsibility to avoid provoking conflict, and that America’s security support for Taiwan was negotiable with China.”

Hass adds: “Trump’s public openness to negotiating with Beijing over America’s posture on Taiwan will serve as the diplomatic equivalent of a matador waving a red flag in front of a bull. It will cause Beijing to intensify its efforts to test the boundaries of what it can gain in terms of loosening America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security.”

Trump’s words certainly cheered a late-May roundtable of Chinese specialists on Taiwan, Sinification reports. Xiamen University’s Li Peng acknowledges Trump’s unpredictability but argues that repeated interactions between Trump and Xi could stabilise the American president himself and thereby support stability in cross–Strait and US–China relations. Shao Yuqun of the Shanghai Institute of International Studies sees Trump’s willingness to discuss arms sales with Beijing as a partial abandonment of the Six Assurances, while his refusal to endorse Taiwan independence implies a policy of non-intervention if conflict intensified between Taiwan and China.

Wang Hailiang of the Shanghai Institute of East Asia Studies, says Beijing must use the next three years — more or less the remainder of Trump’s term, though he did not spell that out — to create a positive, irreversible trend in China–US–Taiwan interactions and push Washington towards “informal honourable neutrality.” In other words, China has to work on a pliable US president while it can.

The importance of using the next two or three years to draw in Taiwan is underlined for some Chinese observers by the entry of a third player, Japan, into the equation. Recent changes to Japan’s defence exports rules would strengthen that country’s defence-industrial base, sustain wartime production capacity, and push the country towards becoming a regional “source of trouble,” write Xu Yongzhi and Duan Zhiyou, two Japan-watchers under State Security’s academic arm. Exports to the United States, Australia, the Philippines and other partners would reinforce a “grid-like” US alliance system, deepen first-island-chain military integration, and help Japan court neighbouring states into a potential China-containment network.

“China’s immediate strategic focus with regards to Taiwan should remain on the United States under Trump, but Japan may become a far more dangerous obstacle after 2028,” writes Renmin University’s Jin Canrong. “First, Japan is moving from backstage involvement to open confrontation, hollowing out its pacifist constitution, expanding arms exports and joining first island chain military activity, yet it still depends heavily on US intelligence, space and strike systems. Second, if constitutional revision succeeds after the 2028 upper-house election, a fully militarised and potentially nuclear-armed Japan would greatly complicate China’s Taiwan strategy, thereby compressing the current window of opportunity for resolving the Taiwan issue.”

Up until the late 1980s, many in the US and other parts of the West might not have been too worried if Taiwan had been taken over by the People’s Republic and merged with the mainland. The island was governed by a harsh one-party dictatorship, first under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and then under his son Chiang Ching-kuo. Censorship was pervasive and the regime’s secret police weren’t averse to working with criminal triads to assassinate critics, including exiles in the United States.

But the younger Chiang’s death in 1989 freed up Taiwanese politics. Elections were held under his successors in the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party, or KMT), with the KMT and the new Democratic People’s Party alternating in power. Despite having fought the communists ardently in the years before 1949, the KMT today is more sympathetic towards reunification than its main rival party.

In Beijing, meanwhile, attitudes hardened after the 1989 killings in Tiananmen Square, and flickering hopes of political “convergence” were rekindled after Xi Jinping came to power in Beijing at the end of 2012. In the West, Taiwan acquired new importance as a gain for democracy and supplier of the world’s main source of semiconductors — the latter an attraction for the Chinese too.

On taking office, Xi made clear that the reunification of Taiwan was one of his key goals. It was not an issue that could be passed along from generation to generation, he told a visiting KMT leader in 2013. The build-up of China’s naval and air power intensified, aimed at making it harder for American forces to operate safely around Taiwan. In about 2019, China dropped the word “peaceful” from its formula for reunification.

But this very maritime ambition, transforming China’s military from land power to one with extensive reach into the oceans, had the effect of quietly enhancing Taiwan’s importance to American strategy. As UNSW strategic analyst Clinton Fernandes pointed out last month, Taiwan has become more and more important in bottling up this Chinese naval power. “Taiwan is a critical node in a chain of islands consisting of US allies and partners: Japan to its north and the Philippines to its south,” he wrote, adding that US forces in Japan and the Philippines control vital sea routes for the Chinese.

“The US can detect, track and follow Chinese submarines as they cross the sensor barrier,” Fernandes went on. “It can trail them covertly with its own very quiet submarines, or use maritime patrol aircraft and ships equipped with antisubmarine warfare helicopters to trail them overtly. It can sink Chinese ships if ordered to do so in a crisis.” This makes the strategic calculations easy to understand: “For China, incorporating Taiwan allows it to deter hostile forces off its own coastline. For the US, if China were to take Taiwan, it would be free to project power into the Pacific Ocean.”

With Xi about to turn seventy-three and positioning for a fourth five-year term as leader, the question is how patient he will be. He is quietly working on the current KMT chairman, Cheng Li-wun, who visited Beijing in April. There, Cheng emerged from a meeting with Xi urging a resumption of cross-strait exchanges.

Back home, the KMT and its allies in Taiwan’s legislature have been blocking and cutting President Lai’s defence budget, reducing the funds available to take up the US$14 billion arms package Trump is holding back. Now in America talking to congressmen and think-tanks, Cheng is presumably arguing for the increasingly unpredictable Trump to keep sitting on it the aid. •

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America, fuck yeah
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
’Cause now you have to answer to…
America, fuck yeah…

“For the habitual critics of US foreign policy in general and Donald Trump’s in particular,” Ferguson wrote, “the analogy between today’s air raids against Iran and the invasion of Iraq nearly twenty-three years ago is too obvious to be resisted.” He even conceded that the South Park team (which made the film) “understood before many commentators that the United States has a track record of coming to save the day and leaving a trail of devastation.”

Yet, he went on, there’s “one thing I can confidently promise about the US–Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: it will not last long.” Unlike Bush in 2003, Ferguson said, Trump’s aim is “not to march into Iran and confer, much less impose, freedom on the Iranians. It is to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s political structure and leave the Iranians to take their freedom from the mullahs and their murderous henchmen.”

Defence and intelligence agency denizens headquartered at Russell Hill in Canberra, wary of instant punditry like Ferguson’s, will also have been looking for the logic in Trump’s Operation Epic Fury. Defence department secretary Greg Moriarty, heading to Washington to replace Kevin Rudd as ambassador, will be particularly focused. The message he is likely to take with him from Australia is: wrap it up quickly, don’t expect an immediate transformation of the Middle East (as some of Bush’s advisers did in 2003), and get your eyes back on the main game: the challenge of China.

The Middle East has long consumed American strategic attention, along with its military resources and political capital, notes Jennifer Parker, an analyst close to Canberra’s defence thinking. “That sustained focus constrained Washington’s ability to compete as effectively as it might have with China,” she wrote in the Nine papers. “The Indo-Pacific was emerging as the central theatre of strategic competition while the US and its allies remained absorbed elsewhere.”

In 2025 and 2026, Parker reminds us, “aircraft carriers were diverted from the Indo-Pacific, where they were intended to deter China, to respond to crises in the Middle East. For a country that identifies China as its primary strategic competitor, that reallocation sits uneasily with its stated priorities.”

In Canberra and elsewhere, defence ministries will also be wondering about the capacity of American forces to sustain operations while keeping stockpiles of munitions for contingencies in Eastern Europe and around Taiwan. The Financial Times reported the Pentagon has ordered fewer than 650 high-altitude interceptors since 2010 and could burn through large quantities quickly in a sustained exchange. As many as 150 are thought to have been used during last year’s twelve-day war with Iran. Officials said “magazine depth” might constrain the scope or duration of operations and force trade-offs affecting US commitments in Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.

China has so far given no sign of taking advantage of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft-carrier group’s move to the Gulf region from its normal East Asia station. Ahead of the annual National People’s Congress session this month, Xi Jinping seems preoccupied with his purge of the People’s Liberation Army top ranks, his latest victim the general in charge of the military region facing Taiwan. Trump’s planned visit to Beijing next month is going ahead, with disruption of China’s oil supplies from Iran a reminder of his unpredictable power.

Trump’s justifications for the war are getting knocked down as soon as they are put up, as much as both his allies and his critics agree the Iranian paramount leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will not be missed.

Iran was resuming work on nuclear weapons, and getting close to producing them, Trump claimed. But after the US–Israel air strikes on its enrichment plants last June, he had already declared that capacity obliterated. The Iranian stockpile of enriched uranium seemed to be entombed under rubble, and a day before the 28 February attack, the Omani chair of Vienna talks between US and Iranian delegations had declared good progress towards agreement on meeting US concerns about nuclear enrichment and weapons development. The talks were due to reconvene on Monday, when an agreement would just meet Trump’s deadline.

Then there was Iran’s ballistic missile program. US officials told reporters they had information that Iran was planning a pre-emptive strike using ballistic missiles, creating an “intolerable” threat to US interests in the region and soon the American homeland. But sources in the Pentagon soon said that was nonsense: though it had missiles able to reach parts of Europe as well as the Middle East, Iran was many years away from achieving intercontinental missile capability.

And finally there was regime change: the aim of removing the theocratic tyranny that repressed its own people and pursued a regional agenda of violence and threats directly and through its network of allies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Yemen against Israel and America. But the Iranian regime was already reeling from sanctions, currency collapse, drought and a recent wave of protests quelled only by massacres. For more than two years since the violent Hamas breakout on 7 October 2023, Israel had blitzed and decapitated Iran’s regional allies.

And then, two days after the attack, US war secretary Pete Hegseth said the operation was not a “democracy-building exercise” and nor was it an “endless” commitment like the Iraq war. “It turns out the regime who chanted ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel,” said Hegseth. “This is not a so-called ‘regime change war’, but the regime sure did change.”

Assassinating a leader is not the same as regime change. If anyone is going to change the regime, it has to be the Iranian public, the people Trump is urging to rise up without giving a commitment to further help.

Adding to the discomfort in Canberra is the fact that the Trump administration has made crystal-clear that it sees Israel as its pre-eminent ally — and, what is more, an ally it is willing to be led by.

The administration was negotiating nuclear limits with Iran last June when Benjamin Netanyahu launched an air strike that Trump felt obliged to join. B-2 bombers carrying deep-penetration weapons were duly mobilised. This is what happened last Saturday too: Netanyahu acted to prevent any possibility of Trump reaching a nuclear deal with Tehran. If anything about the US attacks was pre-emptive, that was it.

As US secretary of state Marco Rubio admitted on Monday, the US attacked not because Tehran was preparing a missile strike but because the US feared Iran’s retaliation after Israel assassinated Khamenei. “There was absolutely an imminent threat and it was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believe that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow,” Rubio said. He tried to walk back this telling remark on Tuesday, with a new narrative taking Israel out of the decision chain.

The administration has drawn an unfavourable comparison between Israel and other old allies, notably Britain whose prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, refused permission for any of the initial attacks against Iran to be launched from the Diego Garcia base on the British-controlled Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. Trump told London’s Daily Telegraph he was “very disappointed in Keir” over this refusal. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump said later at a White House meeting with the German chancellor, adding that the closure of British bases had added hours to transit times for the Iran attacks.

Hegseth also criticised “traditional allies,” accusing them of being hesitant and indecisive about using military force. Israel was a “capable partner” with a clear mission, Hegseth said, while other allies would “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” He went on: “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history… No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

So it really is: Fuck, yeah!

Starmer later changed British policy to allow its bases to be used for operations against Iranian missiles and drones, and for British forces to join such operations. This followed advice from his attorney-general, Richard Hermer, that any British military involvement in the conflict would have to be purely defensive to be legal.

“President Trump has expressed his disagreement with our decision not to get involved with the initial strikes,” Starmer said in parliament. “But it is my duty to judge what is in Britain’s national interest. That is what I have done. And I stand by it.” He declared his decision “in accordance with international law,” adding: “We all remember the mistakes of Iraq… we will not join offensive action now.”

Australia was too far away for its bases to be used directly for the attacks, though the joint satellite ground station at Pine Gap might have relayed operational signals to US forces. The only Australian forces in the Gulf region currently are about a hundred air force and army ground crew operating a transport base inside a vast US–Emirati military airfield near Dubai, which came under drone attack without damage.

Still, it has been an awkward time for Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Penny Wong. Although the US build-up was blatant and Trump’s threats explicit, they seem to have had no advance notice of the Israel-led attack. Now they are bystanders to a chill between their two partners in the AUKUS nuclear submarine and high-tech alliance. Moriarty will no doubt work hard to convince the US administration that Australia is not a “pearl-clutching” ally, but one to be trusted to do the right thing by America with scarce submarines.

But they supported the US action: Iran was a destabiliser, its nuclear and missile programs a risk, and Khamenei’s regime a cruel one. They have quickly dodged questions about its legality, saying this was a matter for the US and Israel to judge — as if international law is what protagonist nations say it is.

Like other allies relegated to the second rank, Canberra will be wondering how much more of the rule book will be jettisoned by Trump’s team. The dispute with the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is hardly reassuring. The company wanted assurances written into its contracts with the Pentagon that its AI systems would not be used to direct fully autonomous lethal weapons or for mass surveillance of US citizens. Hegseth thought this an outrageous restriction and got Trump to bar Anthropic from any and all government contracts, though its AI application, “Claude,” was still being used by US forces to prepare the Iran attack.

Meanwhile, Albanese and other allied leaders will be dealing with the fallout: tens of thousands of travellers stranded in the Gulf; oil and gas prices possibly spiralling with the Hormuz Strait closed and Qatar shutting down its massive LNG plants; waves of Shia Muslim protests and mourning for Khamenei in far-flung Islamic communities including in Australia; and perhaps, when Iran’s rockets run out, a fanning out of terrorists seeking martyrdom.

Meanwhile, have the analysts all been looking at the wrong set of possible goals motivating Trump? In a perhaps prescient article, an anonymous writer in Asia Sentinel looks at Trump’s record and finds “neither a neocon warmonger nor a liberal interventionist” but “a distressed assets hunter.”

The article continued:

In the White House’s current calculus, Venezuela and Iran are not sovereign nations defined by borders and flags. They are underperforming energy super-majors holding a combined 511 billion barrels of reserves, run by boards of directors viewed as incompetent, hostile, and ripe for removal… If Venezuela was the pilot project, Iran is the Grand Prize. With 208 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and the world’s second-largest gas deposits, its strategic weight dwarfs that of Caracas. Control over Iran is not just about resources. It is about controlling the thermostat of the global energy market. Yet Trump views Iran through the same prism: a massive asset suffering from a severe liquidity crisis and a breakdown in internal order. The catalyst for Trump’s escalation was not a specific terrorist threat but the wave of protests beginning last December. The collapse of the rial [Iran’s currency] to historic lows and hyperinflation signalled that management in Tehran had lost its social capital and solvency.

The cynicism spreads even into the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. “If you were in a bunker in Tehran or Karaj,” asked columnist Matthew Syed in London’s Sunday Times, “would you rise up against the Iranian regime on the basis of Trump’s call to arms when he might, even now, be negotiating with a Revolutionary Guard general to cement the regime in place, as he did in Venezuela, on the proviso oil flows west rather than east?”

So far, the Islamic Republic’s institutions are moving ahead with deciding on a successor to Khamenei, who was eighty-six. Three senior Islamic scholars appear to be contenders, including a son of Kamenei and a grandson of the regime’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The new ayatollah will be chosen by a panel of eighty-eight clerics, whom Israel is trying to assassinate as well through further air strikes. The officer corps of the defence and security services are already starting reshuffles to replace the generals also killed in US and Israeli air strikes.

A forty-day mourning period declared for Khamenei will be marked by orchestrated displays of anger and grief. The humiliated Iran Revolutionary Guard Force, with 190,000 personnel and controlling somewhere between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of Iran’s economy, along with the 450,000-member Basij security volunteers and the 420,000-strong regular military will be vigilant against any rejoicing at Khamenei’s death coalescing into protest.

Persuading a new ayatollah to retreat from Khamenei’s failed promotion of an “axis of resistance” against Israel and the West might be a more tangible goal for Western statecraft than an explicit revision of theology. Progress on Palestinian statehood and the promise of a lifting of sanctions linked to good behaviour would help.

So Australian defence planners will probably have to put up with American military efforts being drawn off to the Middle East for a long time yet. At least this time, there seems to have been no pressure, or willingness, to join in. •

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The Pacific Island affairs minister (also in charge of defence industry) should know. He shared a big chunk of responsibility for the largest diplomatic debacle so far experienced by prime minister Anthony Albanese, albeit involving one of Australia’s smaller neighbours.

Conroy went to Vanuatu in August this year with defence minister Richard Marles and foreign minister Penny Wong convinced that its government was ready to sign an agreement giving Canberra approval rights over its security and infrastructure deals with third countries. In return, the island nation would receive A$500 million in aid over ten years.

Most of the Vanuatu government was out of the capital, Port Vila, when the Australians arrived, so Conroy and his colleagues followed them to the island of Tanna, where they were attending a cultural festival. The ni-Vanuatu hosts obliged them by signing a treaty draft at a table perched on the rim of Mount Yasur, an active volcano.

The location might have given a clue to the shakiness of the political ground. When Albanese arrived in Port Vila in September expecting to sign the final agreement, Vanuatu’s prime minister Jotham Napat informed him that signature was impossible due to continuing wrangles about the “wording” of the so-called Nakamal Agreement, named for the communal big houses in the island nation’s villages. As sources in Port Vila explain, the problem was the apparently sweeping veto powers Canberra expected.

In the section on security, one of Canberra’s “red lines” was any form of police cooperation between Vanuatu and countries outside the Pacific Island Forum — which would leave only Australia, New Zealand and island nations in the field. Vanuatu insisted on keeping its freedom to accept help from China and elsewhere.

Nor was Vanuatu happy about having to knock back infrastructure projects that could threaten Australia’s security, one local source told me. “We are worried about what Australia will consider a threat to their security: a wharf? A road? An airport? A threat according to who?”

More than two months later, the differences remain unresolved.

That setback was followed by another when Albanese went to Port Moresby later in September for the fiftieth anniversary of Papua New Guinea’s independence. There, PNG prime minister James Marape wasn’t ready to sign another document worked on by Marles and Conroy — a defence pact known as the Puk-Puk (Crocodile) Treaty — which would pledge each country to come to the other’s defence and allow Papua New Guineans to enlist in the Australian Defence Force.

As the government’s critics in the opposition and News Corp geared up to attack Labor for misreading the region, it emerged that the problem was simply that Marape’s cabinet members had dispersed to their electorates for independence celebrations before the treaty had been put before them. It was duly endorsed after they returned to Port Moresby and signed by Marape when he travelled south to watch a State of Origin rugby league game with Albanese.

The finer details — like how the ADF’s officers and sergeants are being readied to cope with up to 10,000 Melanesian recruits from PNG towns and villages when they are struggling to attract and retain enough personnel from Australia itself — aren’t yet being shared publicly by Marles and Conroy.

The Puk-Puk Treaty is definitely an achievement. But in the absence of any foreseeable external attack, the major security challenges in the South Pacific are domestic ones, particular from crime and violence.

Wong and former attorney-general Mark Dreyfus forged an earlier security agreement to help the PNG police force increase its numbers and deepen its crime solving and prosecution expertise. The government is pursuing similar initiatives elsewhere in the region, but with mixed success.

Two weeks ago, the Vanuatu government announced it would exclude all foreign advisers from its offices, including police and defence officers from Australia and New Zealand, to prevent “outside influence.” At around the same time it also accepted grants of some A$116 million from China to repair and rebuild buildings and roads in Port Vila damaged by last December’s big earthquake. As the government buildings among the worst hit had been built with previous Chinese aid by Chinese firms, though, this seemed more about restoring Beijing’s reputation than expanding influence.

In the Solomon Islands, coming up to a year since Albanese and prime minister Jeremiah Manele announced a A$190 million four-year plan to expand the police force and create a new police academy, agreement on the details still seems far off. Manele told the ABC the delay is due to “language in the agreement” being negotiated. While both countries could still “revisit” the pact, he said, there was no timeline for reaching an agreement.

Across the Melanesian boundary in Polynesia, the Albanese government is also pursuing further defence and police ties with Fiji and Tonga, their conservative governments both being willing partners. On the military side, the two island nations are already working on joint natural disaster responses with Australia and PNG. But they also face a new wave of criminality, deepened by factors in Australia and to some extent New Zealand.

The huge Australian demand for cocaine, methamphetamine and latterly fentanyl, pushing prices to among the highest in the world, has encouraged smuggling through Pacific nations, including on semi-submersible speed boats or narco-subs. Local intermediaries include convicted non-citizen criminals deported from Australia on “character grounds”under the Section 501 provision of the Migration Act — a provision ramped up by Peter Dutton as home affairs minister in Scott Morrison’s government.

Pasifika and New Zealanders, including Māori, form a disproportionately large segment of Australia’s prison population, so the bulk of deportees have gone to New Zealand and island nations. Many get dumped with no local connections or job prospects and turn to crime, their skills enhanced by jail associations. “If a country like New Zealand, with the resources it has in law enforcement, is struggling to deal with the 501 deportees from Australia, one can only imagine the impact deportees from New Zealand and Australia are having in small island states,” points out Canterbury University security specialist José Sousa-Santos.

The chair of New Zealand’s ministerial advisory group on transnational and serious organised crime, Steve Symon, warned in October that Pacific Island nations were at risk of becoming “narco-states,” their police, customs and other border agencies corrupted by crime syndicates. In the meantime, hard drug use is rising in the islands, with associated spread of HIV, leading Wong to announce a new A$48 million program to combat “increasing rates” of infections.

But these are just the start of the troubles the Albanese government faces in the region over the rest of its current term.

In New Caledonia, the government appointed by French president Emmanuel Macron is attempting to placate the indigenous Kanaks with the constitutional device of a new “state” within France. To further this plan, it has won parliamentary endorsement for expanding the territory’s electoral franchise, which could weaken the position of Kanak representatives in local institutions.

The territory of 290,000 people is consequently in an explosive state, with twenty of France’s 120 Gendarmerie (para-military) squadrons, amounting to 2500 troopers, stationed there. In 2024, when Macron’s government attempted a similar electoral rejig, the territory erupted in widespread rioting and arson, causing some €2 billion (A$3.5 billion) in damage, a 13.5 point economic contraction, and an exodus of expatriate residents.

Further afield, the pro-independence president of the autonomous government of Bougainville, Ismael Toroama, was re-elected with 70 per cent of the island’s vote in September. Bougainville’s people voted 98 per cent for independence from PNG in 2019, but under a peace agreement designed to settle a civil war the referendum result needs to be endorsed by the PNG parliament to take effect. Current estimates are that only around one in ten MPs would approve separation. Toroama, a former rebel commander who fought the PNG military, has vowed to declare independence unilaterally by September 2027 if it is not conceded by then.

These will be excruciating diplomatic challenges for Canberra: New Caledonia testing the “First Nations” priority that Conroy lauded in his speech; Bougainville destabilising the security pact with PNG.

But a bigger one, reaching deep into Australian politics, is the widening gap between the Albanese government’s posture as a good climate citizen — by virtue of its efforts to reach net-zero at home by mid-century, its support for the Paris accords, and its help for Pacific island states to cope with the effects of climate change — with its refusal to acknowledge responsibility for emissions from the fossil fuels Australia exports.

In July, the International Court of Justice in The Hague rejected Australian, Saudi, American, British and Chinese assertions that their climate responsibility was entirely covered by global agreements such as the Paris accords. The fifteen sitting justices unanimously found not only that all countries have an obligation to work together to hold global warming to 1.5C but also that obligations don’t simply rest with the end users of fossil fuels.

“Failure of a State to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions — including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies — may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that state,” the judges ruled.

The ICJ action was launched by Vanuatu. While the judgement is advisory, it may be the foundation for specific litigation. With some ninety-four new coal and gas projects lining up in Australia, according to the Australia Institute, Vanuatu or others would seem to have ample cases to raise. They include the forty-five-year extension to Woodside Energy’s North-West Shelf gas project, approved by Albanese’s environment minister Murray Watt in September after objections met a ferocious campaign by Western Australia’s state government, trade unions, and media outlets in support of Woodside. The institute says that project alone adds the equivalent of twelve coal-fired power stations to emissions.

In his Newcastle address, Conroy made reference to the Coalition’s backing away from net-zero. “You can’t engage effectively with the Pacific unless you’re serious about climate,” he said. “They just won’t take you seriously — and with good reason.”

He went on: “Unlike them — I applaud the students of Vanuatu, and the Vanuatu government for galvanising the world to achieve the landmark International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate change. In seeking this opinion, the Pacific has spoken with the moral authority and weight of lived experience.”

On the face of it, then, Albanese’s minister for Pacific Island affairs is supporting the case his own government opposed at The Hague and lending his weight to the notion his prime minister and the environment minister continue to reject.

How much longer can the Albanese government get away with trying to walk both sides of the street?

It suggests the government is under-powered in dealing with the region’s challenges and a broader political dialogue is needed. Perhaps some of the under-utilised talent in Labor ranks — economics PhDs Andrew Leigh and Andrew Charlton, and the technology-astute former industry minister Ed Husic come to mind — could be brought into the engagement. •

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Trump’s tour took in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Busan, where South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung reaffirmed a promise to invest US$350 billion in the United States over the next decade, including in American shipyards, and capped it with a gift of a gold crown, a simulacrum of one worn by an eighth-century Korean monarch.

On his way to Busan, Trump stopped off in Tokyo, where new Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi stood by her predecessor’s pledge of US$550 billion investment and added a favourite golf club of her political mentor, the late Shinzo Abe, and a promise of cherry trees and fireworks for next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence. After announcing a planned lift in Japan’s defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP, she even jived with him to “YMCA” aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier.

At the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim let the American president take the credit for the halt in border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand  that Anwar himself had largely worked out. So, too, came promises to buy American liquified natural gas, missiles and civilian airliners.

Along with their friendly encounters with Trump, these leaders were rewarded with tariff cuts here and there. Anthony Albanese, meanwhile, capped his Washington visit of a week earlier with a seat next to Trump at a dinner put on by South Korea’s Lee.

Yet there was one meeting where the power dynamics were reversed. There, it started to look like Trump might do what the Australian strategist Hugh White and others have long predicted: give up efforts to maintain paramountcy in the Western Pacific and instead share power with China.

At a ninety-minute meeting with China’s Xi Jinping in Busan it was Trump who appeared the supplicant, heaping praise on the Chinese leader. Xi is “distinguished and respected,” the American president declared; indeed, he is a “great leader of a great country.”

Across the table, Xi showed what US scholar Orville Schell calls the “Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile permanently etched on his face” and duly accepted Trump’s respect. “Given our different national conditions, we do not always see eye to eye with each other, and it is normal for two leading economies of the world to have friction now and then,” said Xi. But the two leaders should “stay the right course and ensure the steady sailing forward of the giant ship of China–US relations… China and the United States should be partners and friends. This is what history has taught us and what reality demands.”

The main tangible outcome of the meeting for Trump was China’s agreement to halt for a year the restrictive conditions it had placed on shipments of seventeen rare-earth elements, including specialised magnets, vital for many kinds of electric vehicles, military aircraft and missiles, mobile phones and medical diagnostic machines. China has near-total control of world trade in these refined materials, and Xi’s use of this high-tech stranglehold has virtually halted Trump’s trade and investment war against China. Shipments of US soybeans, food for China’s pigs, would also resume.

Trump left the APEC meeting early, allowing the enigmatic Xi to project himself and China as a more predictable partner, economically at least. Many diplomatic analysts gave Xi a net win over Trump in courting the Asians.

Asian leaders had come to the summit dreading public humiliations at the hands of an unstable Trump. They were spared that. But after leaving the region, Trump delivered a message that has caused consternation among “China hawks” in American and allied strategic circles, most probably including those in Canberra.

In a social media post, Trump called his “G2 meeting with President Xi of China” a great step for both countries. “This meeting will lead to everlasting peace and success. God bless both China and the USA!” His defence secretary Pete Hegseth also referred to the “G2” in an X post after speaking with Chinese defense minister Dong Jun. Hegseth vowed to “deconflict and de-escalate any problems that arise” between the two militaries.

Hong Kong academic Wang Xiangwei, a former editor of the South China Morning Post, was among those struck by the terminology. “It is this collaborative tease that elevates Busan beyond a photo-op,” he wrote, “hinting at the resurrection of the G2 concept — a bipolar stewardship of global affairs by the world’s two economic titans.”

A G2, or Group of Two, was first postulated by the American economist Fred Bergsten in 2005. He argued that the two major economies — China was already set on a high-growth path — needed to keep talking to work out a modus vivendi.

Some observers have interpreted Bergsten’s argument as a call for China and America to jointly rule the world, with the US dropping the goal of pre-eminence in Asia. “It has come to imply a power equilibrium between the two nations — something that Beijing has long coveted as it ascended from regional powerhouse to pivotal global player,” Didi Tang, a China specialist with the Associated Press, wrote this week. As the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Neil Thomas told her: “The G2 concept implies that China and the United States are peers on the global stage and their positions should be given equal weight.”

Trump’s use of “G2” has stirred unease in Washington and across Asia, wrote Ken Moriyasu this week in Japan’s Nikkei Asia. “Critics from previous administrations argue that the phrase signals a bilateral power arrangement that could alienate America’s allies, especially in China’s neighbourhood.” Mira Rapp-Hooper, Asia adviser to former president Joe Biden, agrees: “It is a term that plays very poorly in countries like Japan, Australia and India,” she told AP’s Tang. “They hear the United States deferring to Chinese preferences in Asia, potentially at a cost to their interest.”

Kurt Campbell, who orchestrated the US “pivot” to Asia under Barack Obama — and, some say, the AUKUS deal under Biden — said there were “real anxieties in Asia about the way the actual G2 was manifested.” It was not just the notion that the countries were making decisions that would affect the region, Campbell told the AP’s Tang. “It was how China used the concept or the idea of it to make other surrounding nations feel insecure.” It was a concept, he said, that “has been powerfully delegitimised.”

Even so, Trump has plucked it from somewhere. His remark came “amid the absence of strategy documents from the Trump administration,” as Nikkei’s Moriyasu noted, “be it on a China strategy, Indo-Pacific strategy or a National Defence Strategy. Trump’s words hint at a new vision of cooperation rather than confrontation with China.”

“Somewhat triumphally,” as Tang noted, Chinese commentary quickly picked up on Trump’s use of the term. “Trump’s G2, to some extent, is that the US has accepted the reality that it no longer has the unipolar position but wants to build a bipolar world with China,” said Housha Yueguang, a popular nationalist blog. “It means Europe is no longer important, let alone Japan or India.”

More circumspectly, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said the two countries “can jointly shoulder our responsibilities as major countries” and “work for an equal and orderly multipolar world.” Zhao Minghao, a Chinese academic specialist on China–US relations, said it “does not mean China and the US co-ruling the world” and nor did it mean that cooperation will replace competition in bilateral relations.

Trump’s remarks suggest he is less interested in dominating the security environment in East Asia than in maintaining ascendancy in high technology and manufacturing. His secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense policy director Elbridge Colby are among those pursuing the longstanding effort to bottle up Chinese military power and contest its diplomatic influence. But other members of his administration are “restrainers” who think the United States should limit its efforts in Asia and Europe and concentrate on the American hemisphere.

The president’s recent show of force towards Venezuela suggests the latter camp has greater sway, and other recent Trump actions have damaged Washington’s attempts to rally a wider array of Asian powers as counterweight to China.

His imposition of 49 per cent tariffs on imports from India — punishment for buying Russian oil — and his susceptibility to Pakistani overtures, has put India’s Narendra Modi in a huff. Modi attended the meeting of the China-sponsored Shanghai Cooperation Agreement, his first China visit in seven years, but stayed away from the ASEAN meeting in Kuala Lumpur. He has apparently refused to take phone calls from Trump.

Vietnam was also hurt by Trump’s high tariffs on its exports, now 20 per cent, as punishment for its role as a finishing-off and rebadging centre for some Chinese exports. It has backed away from buying US military transport aircraft and entered a US$8 billion deal with Russia for advanced fighters and air-defence systems.

For Hong Kong–based commentator Wang, the situation has evolved since Bergsten first mooted the G2 and Washington saw China emerging as a “responsible stakeholder” in the existing world order. Chinese leaders saw that role as a trap, drawing China into burdensome global duties, distracting it from domestic development, and alienating it from the developing world. With later efforts to “contain” China having demonstratively failed, says Wang, a G2 would be one of “co-equals, not patron and junior partner.”

These are early days, Wang cautions, given Trump’s “mercurial” character. “The same feed that praises a G2 today can excoriate China tomorrow,” he wrote. “That volatility partly explains Beijing’s cautious tone. Structural problems also lurk beneath the surface of the relationship: a ballooning US trade deficit with China; enduring US restrictions on high-end chips and tools; data security and platform governance; and, above all, Taiwan.”

Among the likely irritants are the “poison pills” Trump inserted into trade deals with Cambodia, Malaysia and maybe others to prevent them joining supply chains that ultimately benefit China. The clauses “threaten to end the agreements if either country signs a rival pact that jeopardises ‘essential US interests’ or ‘poses a material threat’ to US security, reported the Financial Times.

In a first for a US–China leadership meeting, the two leaders didn’t discuss Taiwan in Busan. “It may be tactical,” Wang ventured, “a decision to avoid blowing up a fragile restart, or it may signal that both sides prefer to manage that issue through quieter channels.”

Next year may see the G2 idea fleshed out. Trump plans a visit to Beijing in April, with Xi making a return visit to Washington later next year. “In the end, even a successful G2 will not be warm all the time,” Wang said. “It will be a volatile tango, marked by recurring bouts of friction and periodic resets. But if Washington and Beijing can institutionalise enough cooperation to stabilise the floor while competing responsibly above it, that alone would be good news — particularly for Asia, where the costs of miscalculation would be immediate and severe.”

While such a shift may not go down that well in the halls of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the US Studies Centre at Sydney University and defence agencies, it may not be unwelcome for Albanese. He has just replaced Office of National Intelligence director-general Andrew Shearer — a China hawk appointed by Scott Morrison — with senior career diplomat Kathy Klugman, who is likely to pursue a softer approach to China at the top intelligence coordination and assessment body.

For his part, Hugh White sees his long-predicted power-sharing arrangement coming into being. “Back in the 2010s, when the G2 idea  first appeared, there was still an overwhelming assumption in Washington that America’s position of global leadership remained unchallengeable,” White tells me. “Support for the G2 idea was therefore based on the expectation that China was going to be the world’s second-most important and powerful country, but not an equal of the US.”

With everyone else having left the room, says White, Washington imagined America telling China what to do — “not a model that ever appealed to the Chinese, of course.”  Trump’s Washington might be realistic: “Behind the MAGA bombast about American greatness and Trumpian power and prowess lies an uneasy recognition that China these days really is an equal, and must be dealt with as such.” •

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There, in Papua New Guinea, he will find signs of the Australian legacy, from the love of Rugby League football and the felt hats, moleskin trousers and elastic-sided boots favoured by its politicians to the institutions and notables welcoming him: a Westminster-style parliament, a governor-general representing the distant monarch, the bewigged justices in their new court centre.

But after encountering nationalistic prickliness in Vanuatu and the Solomons, the Australian prime minister will find the power dynamics between the Australian parent and the grown-up Papua New Guinean child greatly changed by the decades. Generosity and friendliness remain, but Canberra’s efforts at guidance are more and more tentative, if they’re made at all.

Even when PNG was staggering from successive political and fiscal crises in 2004, John Howard’s naive attempt to intervene by inserting 210 police and sixty-eight treasury officials to clean up PNG’s corruption met insurmountable objections. A court case challenging the immunity Howard wanted for the Australians marked its end.

From then on, buoyed by a resources boom, prime minister Michael Somare’s relations with Howard were testy. In 2011, his successor Peter O’Neill leveraged Kevin Rudd’s scheme to park boat people on PNG’s remote Manus Island to get Canberra off his back. “By then Australia’s brief attempt to exercise policy influence had come to an end,” say the authors of Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust, a new ANU study of PNG’s economic record since independence.

The Manus deal marked a new phase in Australia’s relations with PNG — a phase “in which power shifted from the former to the latter.” The scales tilted further from around ten years ago, when China began looming much larger. “PNG was increasingly viewed in Australian policymaking circles through a China lens,” write the ANU researchers, led by economist Stephen Howes. “What mattered from this perspective was not whether Australia was having a beneficial impact on PNG but simply whether it was popular. While budget support was again provided in the most recent period, this time it came with less onerous conditions.”

Over the early decades of PNG’s independence, Canberra had shifted its economic support from general contributions to the PNG budget to more specific program aid, tying funds to projects rather than letting PNG ministers and bureaucrats decide how to spend them. Since 2019, under Scott Morrison and then Albanese, Australia has provided the PNG Treasury with swathes of soft loans — nearly A$3.2 billion over five years — free of what the researchers call the “onerous and controversial policy conditions” of previous eras.

In return, Albanese has persuaded PNG to look to Australia and its allies first for defence and security arrangements. But the issue isn’t straightforward: Australia’s northern neighbour still has about 20,000 Chinese residents (as against about 10,000 Australians), most of them recent migrants, as well as numerous Chinese state-owned enterprises ready to undertake projects at cut-throat prices.

That geo-political game will continue. But there is another kind of security question, one about PNG’s inner resilience and the prospects for improvements in wellbeing and livelihoods. Aside from the benefits for ordinary citizens, it is these that will create the strength PNG needs to resist malign influences and engage more with the world.

Behind the big projects that make PNG one of the most resource-dependent countries in the world — with gas, oil, gold, copper and nickel making up 32 per cent of GDP in 2022 — the government’s performance has been lacklustre. The result has been a dual economy, the ANU study shows, with the benefits going to the better-off strata of the urban populations.

The rural 85 per cent of PNG’s people have seen stagnation. Over the fifty years of independence, the annual growth rate of non-resource GDP per person has averaged just 0.4 per cent and the annual growth in formal-sector employment only 1.5 per cent. Life expectancy, literacy and school enrolments have continued to improve, but “non-income indicators” remain “alarmingly low by international standards and, in some cases, have worsened.”

The report continues: “In recent years, PNG has had the lowest rate of immunisation, the fourth-highest rate of child stunting [nearly one in two] and risk of premature death from non-communicable disease, and the seventh-lowest doctor–population ratio in the world [63 per million].”

As well as its fractured geography, ethno-linguistic diversity and rigid systems of customary land ownership, independent PNG started out in 1975 with some high-cost Australia legacies.

One was the floor on wages and civil service salaries, and their regular indexation, which Somare had won ahead of independence in 1972–75 with the help of Bob Hawke’s ACTU. Until it was unwound in the early 1990s, PNG had the highest wage costs in developing Asia, and those rates of pay encouraged thousands of hopeful villagers to Port Moresby. Their disappointment eventually added to the growing crime problem.

Another was the pegging of the new currency, the kina, to the Australian dollar, reducing the exchange-rate buffer that would have muted global price downturns for the coffee, cocoa and other tree crops that gave many households their only cash income. Despite different exchange rate systems and suspended kina convertibility, this remains a negative for all except the politicos protected from the consequences of running up budget deficits.

Dual economy: with the Ok Tedi mine’s copper-slurry loading dock in the background, villagers wait for canoes home after shopping in Kiunga’s Chinese-run stores. Hamish McDonald

The big copper mine opened by Conzinc Riotinto Australia on Bougaineville island also proved a time-bomb thanks to the Australian administration’s disregard for local land-ownership issues. The mine was providing half PNG’s exports at independence and much of the government’s revenue. But the locals wanted out of PNG from the start. In 1989 they closed down the mine and started a civil war.

New resource projects blossomed, meanwhile, pushing GDP growth up to 18 per cent in 1993. PNG no longer needs the Bougainville mine, but its leaders are still unwilling to endorse the express wish of 98 per cent of Bougainvilleans to have their independence.

Try as the ANU authors might to focus on economic policies, they can’t ignore politics and governance. As elsewhere in Melanesia, Papua New Guineans took to the Westminster system left by Australia like ducks to water. Then they muddied it in their own special ways. “Elections continued to be regularly held,” the authors say, “but a political culture of clientelism and precarity became entrenched, with MPs elected on the basis of local issues and a high rate of turnover of MPs every election.”

With increasing numbers attracted to politics, and with MPs’ business interests growing, “no distinction developed between the political and the business class. As parties weakened, politics became increasingly attractive, but as an arena for never-ending power contestation rather than for competing policies.”

Increasingly, MPs used their personal slush funds, allocated from the budget, to compensate for declining administrative services and build up their own prestige. Corruption scandals didn’t keep them out of action for long.

Meanwhile, crime and violence were making Port Moresby notoriously unsafe. That has moderated somewhat, but across the country local groups use real or spurious land claims to hold up projects. Modern high-powered guns turn up in fights between political support outfits and tribal groups across the populous Highlands.

There are bright spots, however. Alongside the unruly legislature, “judicial independence and integrity have been largely maintained and many look to the judiciary as a bulwark against chaos,” the ANU authors maintain:

And, indeed, the judiciary does play a vital dispute-settlement role, especially for the political class. The courts also provide a useful constraint on power. Since, given the lack of fixed party divisions, it is often not difficult to obtain the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed for constitutional change, politicians control the constitution except to the extent that the courts rule that constitutional changes are inconsistent with other parts of the original constitution.

The downside of this “regime stability” is that PNG is among the most litigious countries in the world. “This is costly, and slows down change, whether positive or negative, and development.”

It adds up to a political system that has proven unusually durable. Few developing-country regimes last more than twenty years without an unheaval of some kind. In contrast to the rapid turnover resulting from votes of no-confidence in early decades of independence, PNG’s governments have become more stable. Over the past twenty years, the country has had only three prime ministers, as against seven in Australia (or eight if Rudd is counted twice).

But while the state is stable, it is also weak. “PNG’s development outcomes can be explained by its hyper-politics and pervasive insecurity, and the feedback effects generated by the weak state and the low growth these two factors cause,” the ANU authors argue. “Political regime stability provides a positive countervailing force, meaning that the constraints on development in PNG have led, not to collapse, but to a weak-state and low-growth equilibrium.”

PNG has felt both the positive and the negative impacts of resource growth — the latter, an unbalanced economy, known as the “resource curse” among economists. “An increasingly resource-dependent economy is one in which a weak state becomes ever more important as a distributor of economic rents, and perhaps weaker as it is distracted from other policy challenges. It is probably also one that is even more prone to conflict. These feedback loops constitute Papua New Guinea’s institutional resource curse.”

Being economists, the authors rely on the available data. But they admit that not much is known about economic activity that goes unmeasured. Huge numbers of households seem to growing and trading betel nut, the narcotic chewed and shared for its mild uplift and impact on sociability. Many make and sell snacks, or trade home produce.

When the government relaxes its controls, private services spring up. The country may have only 5000 or so police for its 11.8 million population, but it has 31,000 registered security guards and numerous neighbourhood watch networks. When the state monopoly on mobile telephone services ended in 2007, Digicel expanded to more than two million subscribers. Responding with ingenuity, micro-insurance and other businesses took advantage of the new network.

This non-government energy perhaps explains why Papuan New Guineans appear so stoic despite a political system that hasn’t yet tackled pressing, deep-rooted problems, including how to put traditionally held land to modern uses, how to better protect individual safety and property, and how to direct resource earnings to general welfare.

“Many things have got worse, and there are certainly serious risks,” say the ANU authors, “but, so far, the pessimism of the doomsday merchants has been as misplaced as the optimism of PNG’s boosters.” •

Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust: An Economic History of Papua New Guinea Since Independence
By Stephen Howes, with Martin Davies, Rohan Fox, Maholopa Laveil, Manoj Pandey, Kelly Samof and Dek Joe Sum | ANU Press | $79.95 print, or free download | 442 pages

The post PNG’s half-century report card appeared first on Inside Story.

In some countries, Manele’s decision has been portrayed as ingratitude — even in Australia and New Zealand, forum members that will each have a seat at the leaders’ table. But the Honiara jeremiad might be getting rueful sympathy from a wider selection of bigger countries on this side of the Pacific. Great power competition no longer seems to be working to the benefit of the countries of East Asia — Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — or the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or even Australia and New Zealand themselves.

Instead, they have been singled out for erratic treatment, and punishment, since Donald Trump’s was first elected to the White House nearly a decade ago, punctuated by the Joe Biden interlude. Constant admonishments from Washington have demanded more defence spending and explicit opposition to China, regardless of trade links and likely retaliation by Beijing.

In Australia’s case, the government has responded by stepping up engagement with Asia, providing more security-linked aid in the Pacific, engaging in more big-talking and cheque-writing in defence, and maintaining a head-below-the-parapet stance towards Washington. (Except for occasional placatory gestures, like Aztec priests throwing sacrifices into the volcano, that have so far included a lifting of a longrunning ban on US beef and two US$500 million contributions to American submarine yards.)

For all countries in the region, Trump’s most shocking move has been the removal of mostly low-tariff, quota-free access to the rich American market, with no exceptions for friends and allies. This month’s anniversary of the end of the second world war is a reminder that access to American consumers helped Japan rebuild after its wartime devastation, moving from manufacturing toys and gadgets to transistor radios and then from motorbikes and video-cassette recorders to cars and computers. Behind Japan came the Asian “tigers” — Korea, Taiwan and Singapore — followed by a wider array of manufacture exports from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Until recently, American elites saw this trade as a strategic gain, creating robust capitalist economies and eventually more prosperous markets for US products. America adapted, with its carmakers building regional factories into their supply chains and bringing smaller Asian-designed cars into their ranges. If Japan and others supplied hardware like television sets and VCRs, the real money was in the content that played on them, and that was made in Hollywood. More revolutions came out of America: mobile phones and wi-fi, advanced pharmaceuticals, geospatial systems, electric cars, AI. America’s deficit in the goods trade was increasingly counterbalanced by a surplus in services.

Now Trump is playing to pushed-aside American blue-collar workers (many of them now past retirement age) with dreams of bringing back car and steel production and manufacturing and assembling semiconductors and mobile devices. Japan, South Korea and New Zealand have been hit with 15 per cent tariffs, Taiwan and Vietnam with 20 per cent, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia with 19 per cent. Whether it stimulates US domestic industry enough to warrant the price effects for American consumers remains to be seen.

The region’s leaders have had to tell their people this was the best they can get, in many cases after pleading with Trump and accepting wildly ambitious demands in return. Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim agreed to invest US$70 billion in America. After the meeting with Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba on 22 July, the White House announced Japan would invest US$550 billion in US industry and facilitate new imports of US cars, farm produce, aircraft and liquified natural gas.

Japanese officials later clarified that the investments would be made by Japanese businesses on normal commercial terms, and it can be assumed that many of the promised imports would have been made anyway. (American-model cars are unlikely to be seen much in Japan’s narrow streets, where they have cachet mainly among yakuza bosses and film stars.) “Japan has been playing rope-a-dope on trade commitments for fifty years,” says John Berthelson, publisher of Asia Sentinel. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

The reaction in Japan has nonetheless been furious. “It’s nothing but an outrageous act that will destroy the post–World War II international economic order,” editorialised the mass circulation Mainichi Shimbun. In the Asahi Shimbun, veteran Washington correspondent and economics professor Kensuke Karube likened Trump to a chimpira, a protection racketeer. “[Tariffs have] become a bargaining chip in Trump-style deals, sometimes like violent thuggish shakedowns, to achieve various US policy objectives,” he commented.

It’s not just an economic strategy, agrees Vietnamese-Canadian lawyer and commentator Khanh Vu Duc. “It is a [wider] strategy cloaked in tariffs,” he wrote early this month in Asia Sentinel. As well as demanding zero-tariff access for US exports in return for lower-than-threatened access, Trump demanded rules of origin and trans-shipment disclosure, especially to block Chinese rerouting of exports through third-party nations, and alignment with his security objectives. It was all designed to isolate China.

“What we are witnessing is the birth of a Transactional Order, a system where access to the US economy is conditional upon political alignment and economic reciprocity,” says Duc. “Trump’s deals signal an end to the postwar liberal order anchored by the World Trade Organization, and a transition to an American-centric hub-and-spoke system where power, not principle, dictates terms.”

It has a certain logic, he adds. “It rewards loyalty, punishes opportunism, and leverages America’s economic gravity to enforce strategic discipline. For countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even parts of the EU, it offers a path to security and prosperity, provided they accept American rules of engagement.”

The examples of Brazil (hit with 50 per cent tariffs for not calling off its prosecution of ex-president Jair Bolsanaro), India (threatened with 50 per cent for buying Russian oil) and Canada (35 per cent for being, well, defiantly Canadian) hover as the sort of club Trump is prepared to wield. Along with the tariffs come public insults. Modi was stung by Trump’s comment that he ran a “dead economy” (India has been the fastest-growing big economy in recent years), an insult that has driven a truck through the Quad strategic alignment of India with the United States, Japan and Australia.

As well as the economic hit, Trump is removing much of the other support coming out of America. Well-off families will worry about the quality of education in the universities he is shaking down, and whether they and their children could get caught up in a capricious and punitive immigration system. His dismantling of the US Agency for International Development removes well-appreciated aid programs in the poorer parts of the region.

Trump’s heath secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, has just removed US$500 million in government support for mRNA vaccines, which played a huge part in quelling Covid-19 in Asia and elsewhere. USAID assistance to the South Pacific was relatively small (about US$1.4 billion over 2009–22) but considered effective. One focus in Papua New Guinea, for example, was public health; lapsing vaccinations there have just led to a new outbreak of polio.

“Trump is an example of the dangers faced by a country when its leader is ignorant and uneducated,” writes author and mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara in the current issue of the monthly Bungei Shunju. “It was the high quality of American university research that turned the US into a first-rate country. Trump seems totally unaware of this and behaves like the Chinese emperor who burned books and buried scholars alive.”

Many of Trump’s threats and actions are designed to whip non-China Asia into line. But are they working? Not exactly.

“The overall direction of travel… is clear,” according to Singaporean scholars Yuen Foong Khong and Joseph Chinyong Liow, writing in Foreign Affairs. “Southeast Asian countries may insist that they are staying above the fray, but their policies reveal otherwise. The region is drifting toward China, a fact that bodes ill for American ambitions in Asia.”

In Indonesia, for example, new political elites and business groups pushing a pro-growth agenda see China as a source of economic opportunity rather than ideological threat. Newly elected president Prabowo Subianto’s first foreign visit was to China, and Chinese premier Li Qiang has since made a reciprocal visit to Indonesia. The Southeast Asians “pick à la carte from American and Chinese offerings,” write Khong and Liow. India’s Narendra Modi is also off to China soon, after border confrontations between the two countries have cooled.

Surveys of elite opinion in Southeast Asia showed a wariness about China — it came a distant fourth in trust after Japan, the United States and the European Union, in that order — and fears about “not just the serious loss of access to US investment and the American market but also the United States’ abdication of its economic leadership…” Khong and Liow go on: “If it becomes clear that the United States is disengaging economically and militarily from the region, its ten countries will increasingly have to rely on one another and engage with Australia, Japan, and South Korea more seriously.”

Unlike in Europe, Trump is showing no sign of pulling back America’s military role in Asia. If he made that momentous move, Japan and South Korea could possibly go nuclear — and maybe Australia too. But the US economic relationship he seeks with China is still unclear, perhaps even to himself. What emerges will affect trade patterns all around the region, and it’s likely to be tangled up with competition in technology.

China’s leader Xi Jinping met Trump’s announced tariffs with tit-for-tat responses and threats. Chinese exports to the United States now face 30 per cent tariffs and US shipments to China 10 per cent. Trump has backed off for a second time on his threatened 145 per cent tariffs, with ninety-day pause running to 10 November.

Derided by Trump’s treasury secretary Scott Bessent for negotiating with “a pair of two’s” (a reference to poker), Xi has used China’s dominance in certain strategic materials to win concessions. He has wielded China’s choke on rare earths and special magnets (used in hi-tech devices from electric vehicles to F-35 fighters) to force Trump to lift a ban on exports of Nvidia’s powerful H20 micro-processors.

China hawks are fuming. “President Donald Trump’s team just gave China’s rulers the technology they need to beat us in the artificial intelligence race,” write former Trump security adviser Matt Pottinger and one-time National Security Council member Liza Tobin. “If he doesn’t reverse this decision, it may be remembered as the moment when America surrendered the technological advantage needed to bring manufacturing home and keep our nation secure.”

In the region Xi is seen as playing Trump deftly and offering the prospect of an alternative market, to the extent he can maintain China’s growth and open up its economy. “Beijing is edging towards a more active leadership role in a fragmented world through domestic reform, regional cooperation and support for open, multilateral trade,” says economist Jiao Wang of Britain’s Sussex University. It’s role-reversal in progress.

Playing all this has been a delicate exercise for prime minister Anthony Albanese and his government. Along with Britain alone, Australia has so far got away with the Trump “baseline” tariff of 10 per cent (apart from specific 50 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminium). Albanese has not been noticeably anxious to join the conga line of trade supplicants at the White House.

But the situation is precarious. Trump is under pressure from Big Pharma and social media giants to punish Australia for keeping down the price of pharmaceuticals and putting age restrictions on social-media sites. And when Albanese was weighing recognition of Palestinian statehood he would have had in mind Trump’s reaction to the earlier decision by Canada’s Mark Carney: “Wow! Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine. That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!”

Even so, Albanese made the decision on Palestine — though not before France, Britain and Canada, and hedged with conditions — at last bringing Australia into alignment with Indonesia and Malaysia and breaking with Washington. He has also made a long official visit to China that included a meeting with Xi Jinping. And he has batted off a demand by US defence secretary Pete Hegseth for an immediate lift in defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and a suggestion by US senior defence official Elbridge Colby that Canberra commits to the defence of Taiwan.

Behind this defensive posture, what is the Australian government doing? In open forums, Penny Wong has held back from direct criticism of Trump over tariffs. “Australia still believes in the logic of the postwar economic order, which continues to enable development and growth through openness,” the foreign minister said in a wide-ranging speech in Kuala Lumpur last month. By contrast, she directly pointed to “destabilising and dangerous conduct” by China in the South China Sea.

Trade minister Don Farrell has been more pointed. Institutions and rules made after 1945 had brought unprecedented global economic growth, he told the Lowy Institute earlier this month. “But these institutions and norms we worked so hard to build are being questioned and the rules we wrote are being challenged,” he said. “One of the chief designers of the global trading system, the United States, is now questioning the benefits of open, rules-based trade… What we risk seeing is a shift from a system based on shared prosperity and interdependence to one based solely on power and size. We cannot risk a return to the ‘law of the jungle.’”

Has Australia’s embassy in Washington spoken up for its Asian and Pacific partners on the tariffs, either directly to the Trump administration and congress, or to the US public? “Australia continues to advocate on Indo-Pacific economic and trade matters in the US,” a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade official tells me. “We are in close contact with counterparts from Southeast Asia and the Pacific on their engagement with the Administration and Congress.”

Back in the South Pacific, meanwhile, Australia pursues the geopolitical contest in the absence of the Americans. In early August, defence minister Richard Marles opened a refurbished patrol boat base on Manus Island, facing north from Papua New Guinea. Then he flew to Vanuatu, where — at a table placed surreally on the rim of Tanna island’s rumbling and smoking volcano Mount Yasur — he, Penny Wong and Pacific minister Pat Conroy initiated a new pact with their Vanuatu counterparts.

This so-called Nakamal Agreement, named for the communal house in the villages of Vanuatu, provides for assistance valued at $500 million over ten years. It is said to include a promise by Vanuatu that Australia would be top of the list if the island nation needed to call for security assistance. Barring any last-minute quibbles, the agreement comes into force when signed by Albanese and Vanuatu prime minister Jotham Napat on the sidelines of the forum meeting in Honiara next month.

If the ministers had gone down from Mount Yasur to the nearby village of Sulphur Bay, they would have seen the headquarters of the messianic John Frum movement, founded in wartime years after Tanna people reported visitations by a yellow-haired man, apparently American, who came to free and redeem them. Followers still march every February in US army fatigues behind the Stars and Stripes, hoping (as they say in the Bislama vernacular) that “John Frum, he come.” But numbers are dwindling. The islanders, like people across the region, are realising they have to look after each other and not look to America. •

The post Rallying the region appeared first on Inside Story.

The earliest was the journalist Peter Greste, whose The First Casualty described his 400 days in Cairo’s Tora jail. Then came Melbourne University’s Kylie Moore-Gilbert with The Uncaged Sky, her account of 804 days in Iran’s notorious Evin and other prisons. Then there was the economist Sean Turnell, who described his 650-days confinement in Myanmar’s Insein and other jails in An Unlikely Prisoner.

Now comes A Memoir of Freedom, journalist and television presenter Cheng Lei’s account of her even more drawn-out imprisonment: 1155 days mostly in the constantly florescent-lit, curtained, microphoned and CCTV-monitored cells of a prison on the outskirts of Beijing run by China’s state security ministry.

Until August 2020 Cheng was a star of China’s official outward-facing media, hosting a business program on the English-language service of China Global TV Network, CGTN, housed in a futuristic building designed by star Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, living in a comfortable apartment nearby, attending yoga sessions and parties with Chinese and foreign friends, and interviewing the Chinese entrepreneurs dazzling the world with their sudden successes.

Growing up, she’d spent her first ten years in rural Hunan before moving to Australia in 1985 with her academic scientist father. High school in Brisbane was followed by a commerce degree at the University of Queensland and a job in accountancy — and then the ultra-booming Chinese economy drew this bilingual Chinese-Australian into the TV world covering it.

All went well until an official visit to her office led to a roomful of serious state security officials and a search of her apartment. Informed she was under investigation for transferring state secrets to foreign organisations, she was blindfolded and taken to what she later learned was a security service jail at 47 Dahongmen Nanlu, in Beijing’s Fengtai district.

For six months she was under “residential surveillance at a designated location,” which sounds like house arrest but was actually a room with lights always on, curtains drawn, and a guard standing forty centimetres in front of her while another sat by her side. It was a world of no’s: no strenuous exercise, no arms inside the doona, no arms over the eyes, no turning to the wall, no talking, no moving while sitting, no items left in room. She had “never been more bored, more lonely, more afraid,” she recalls.

Her first consular visit by ambassador Graham Fletcher and other officials came after two weeks. She was allowed to change from her prison garb into her own clothes, ordered not to discuss her case, and taken blindfolded and strapped to a wheelchair to a room where she could talk to the embassy team, but only by a video link. Australia’s intercession at least got her some “fresh air”: fifteen minutes a day of open windows behind the curtains.

She constantly wondered what she had done to get this attention. She had posted cynical comments on social media about China’s “opaque and heavy-handed” response to the Covid outbreak that had started in Wuhan early that year. She was aware that Australia’s relations with China had chilled since foreign minister Marise Payne had proposed an international investigation of the origins of the pandemic and prime minister Scott Morrison suggested it should have “weapons inspector” powers.

She might also have been aware, but doesn’t mention in the book, that the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had conducted heavy-handed and well-leaked raids on the homes of Chinese state media representatives and others in June 2020.

She would later be told that state security had started investigating her on 23 April, four days after Payne’s public call. She was aware that two Canadians had been detained by the security service in response to Canada’s arrest of senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a United States extradition warrant. (When Meng was freed, the two Canadians were taken straight to the airport for a flight home. Unbeknownst to Cheng, they had been held in the same jail as her.)

Despite the Canadian precedent, her chief interrogator insisted her case was “not hostage diplomacy.” She immediately thought of a saying among foreign correspondents in China: “It’s not true until a Chinese official denies it.” Wisely she bit her tongue.

Instead, her interrogators zeroed in on an incident on 22 May 2020 when Cheng had gone to her office early to report on the annual Work Statement given by the Chinese premier to the rubber-stamp legislature. It was due for release at 7.30am. Seven minutes ahead of that embargo, Cheng had texted some contacts with the headline news: because of Covid, China would not be setting a growth target for that year.

This was gold for her best friend Haze Fan, a producer with the financial information service Bloomberg. “News was her diet and scoops her G-spot,” Cheng says. A lead over rivals like Reuters measured in minutes or even seconds would help justify Bloomberg’s US$20,000-a-month subscriptions.

From then on, the interrogation centred on establishing whether Cheng’s text message amounted to leaking a state secret to a foreign organisation. (Her friend Fan was arrested too, but released within a year with no apparent charge.) Cheng was constantly given paper and pen to write about it in those terms. After two months, her interrogator said her latest effort was not “profound enough.” She asked what he meant. “You have to show we have done our jobs,” Li said. “Their job,” Cheng realised, “was to churn out iron-clad guilty pleas.”

As a French colleague and I discovered a long time ago when we were each issued with a blank sheet of paper to atone for unauthorised reporting in Henan province, China’s accused are invited to over-egg the narrative. As her detention went on into years, Cheng said she came to relish the opportunity for creative self-criticism.

“For me it was a welcome challenge to not repeat myself, to discover new phrases to admit sin and profess regret, to make promises of turning over a new leaf using original wording,” she writes. “‘They ask for turd; I have to turn in the best-looking turd,’ I told my cell-mates. When in doubt, intersperse the self-flagellation with praise for the officers and the system. Me bad; you good, very good. It was quite liberating, really, when truth wasn’t a goal and your audience wouldn’t know satire if they sat on it.”

After six months, Cheng passed from “residential surveillance” to a common cell in the same complex: a room shared with three to four other women, its floor space largely taken up with a six- by two-metre sleeping platform, with a glass-walled toilet and a hose for weekly showers and laundry — and, of course, sensitive microphones and cameras.

In contrast with the experiences of Greste, Moore-Gilbert and Turnell, she did not have morale-supporting dialogue with dissident intellectuals and other brave souls sharing the cells and exercise yards. With all inmates forbidden to talk about their cases, she got only sketchy, furtive information about who they were and of what they were accused. Among them was a district head accused of developer bribes, a Uighur cabin-crew member with alleged terrorist connections, an official arrested because she had reported being approached for secrets, a cardiologist serving eight years for sharing information with British researchers, a nuclear engineer suspected because of his studies in Japan. Her cellmates had been in for years, many still awaiting trial or verdict.

The randomness is perhaps designed to make the point that no one should feel safe. It’s part of the dichotomy facing the Chinese leader Xi Jinping: the more he gives state security free rein to tighten control around the Communist Party, the further he takes China from the innovation and individuality needed to lift it out of the middle-income trap and spread the benefits of development.

Cheng Lei soon decided to roll with the system, playing mind games and making the most of the erratic supply of books made available by guards or sent in by the embassy. She emerges as a robust character, undaunted by playground teasing as a newly arrived schoolgirl in Australia, being raped by an intruder as a teenager, two early marriages that didn’t work out, and a sense of having fallen into the gap between two worlds, two countries.

Living on a bland, protein-free prison diet made worse by food shortages during Covid, she lost much weight and shed some hair, and her periods dwindled. Bemoaning the enforced lack of femininity, she managed to sneak auto-eroticism past the cameras. It made sure everything still worked, she says. “It was also a fuck-you to the system — you can deny me everything but you can’t keep me from an orgasm.” Winston Smith would approve.

Her lawyer’s first visit came after ten months. He wanted her to plead not guilty: a prosecutor had told him the case was nonsense. She countermanded him. The prosecutor then made an implicit plea deal for a five-year jail term if she stuck to her confessions. She was driven out to a courtroom for a quick trial on 31 March 2022, with Ambassador Fletcher trying to attend but excluded.

More limbo followed as she waited for the sentence. Then came the May 2022 election in Australia, with Morrison’s government out and Labor in. At the end of the year, Anthony Albanese met Xi on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Jakarta. The freeze was thawing: Cheng Lei got a first phone call to her family in Melbourne, and later her first meeting with Fletcher and his team.

It took until 27 September 2023 for her case to unwind. She was brought back to court for sentencing. Judges, prosecutor and security officials were all beaming at their own beneficence: her sentence was two years, eleven months. With time in residential surveillance discounted by half, her release was eleven days away.

Those days dragged through endless bureaucracy. The Supreme Court had to endorse the unusually short sentence. It did of course, obeying orders. Finally she was on a flight to Melbourne, with Fletcher sitting beside her and foreign minister Penny Wong waiting to embrace her.

Ignoring admonishments from her jailers not to write bad things about the system, Cheng Lei has produced an enthralling and horrifying account of three years designed to be as colourless and depersonalising as possible. It even makes Cairo’s Tora, Yangon’s Insein and even Tehran’s Evin seem somehow preferable.

Cheng is remarkably easy on the figures that got her into it. At the very end of the book, she accepts as “convincing” the theory that her jailing was punishment for Marise Payne’s call for a Covid inquiry, though she says this “theory” comes from her partner, Nick Coyle. Perhaps that’s because she is now employed by Sky TV, a News Corp refuge for Scott Morrison–era politicos and their thinking, and the book is published by a News Corp imprint.

A new edition might look at the strange parallels between her case and that of Sun Lijun, an Australian-educated vice-minister of the public security ministry, the police counterpart of state security. His handling of the Covid epidemic led him into criticism of Xi Jinping’s leadership. He was arrested on the same day Marise Payne made her call, four days ahead of investigations into Cheng Lei. Cheng indicates the first she heard about the media conjecture linking her to Sun came with her lawyer’s first visit, and was a surprise. But did she know him? It’s a teasingly loose end.

A big personality, Cheng deserves a wider audience than Sky’s tiny viewership. She is also well qualified to be interlocutor in forums about trade and investment between Australia and China. But with visiting Chinese premier Li Qiang’s bodyguards blocking her from his sight at a press conference in Canberra last year, it seems likely that many in Australia–China circles — like those who allowed that incident to happen — will shy away from employing her talents. •

A Memoir of Freedom
By Cheng Lei | HarperCollins | $35.99 | 352 pages

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post 1155 days in the life of Cheng Lei appeared first on Inside Story.

Australia has a zombie rampaging through Canberra, diverting well-meaning politicians and officials from useful activity and gobbling up increasing amounts of tax dollars. This is the AUKUS nuclear submarine project.

That it was hatched by two of the world’s most discredited politicians of recent times, Australia’s Scott Morrison and Britain’s Boris Johnson, and sprung on a senescent US president, Joe Biden, testifies to its swamp-like origins. But Labor’s Anthony Albanese accepted it in 2021, fearful of a defence wedge, and his deputy and defence minister Richard Marles threw in the necessary sacrifices to sustain it.

With Albanese now re-elected with a strong majority, can we expect a reappraisal of this zombie worship? Does AUKUS show signs of collapse?

A concerted attack on its brain from outside the government must be having some effect. In the absence of a formal explanation of its purpose to parliament and public, critics have been beating it on the head. Labor seniors like Paul Keating and Bob Carr identify the likely reduction in Australian sovereign power; naval experts point to the technical demands of operating nuclear submarines, let alone building them in Adelaide; other observers highlight the limited availability of US submarines for transfer.

The latest attack on AUKUS comes from the economist Stephen Grenville, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, whose particular concern is the goal of building a British–Australian design submarine in Adelaide after taking delivery of some US-built submarines for initial capability and practice.

“Why reopen the case for domestic construction of nuclear submarines?” Grenville asks. “The totally inadequate initial decision process would be reason enough. Detailed evaluation since then has taken the initial framework as set-in-stone and focused on implementation — the ‘optimal path’ for achieving what was initially decided.”

The case for this approach is “feeble,” he says. The 20,000 promised “good jobs” would simply transfer skilled workers from elsewhere in a full-employment economy. There is no existing industrial base in this sector, and nor do any export prospects give economies of scale.

As for the “sovereignty” argument: if Australia were ever cut off, could it build more submarines without foreign assistance — any more than it could F-35 fighters, for instance? “We don’t build our defence aircraft here, so why are submarines different?” asks Grenville. “If we are talking about vital supply threats, then there are many competing concerns — computer chips and medicines come to mind.”

Questions also hover over the British submarine builder as a partner for the still-to-be-designed AUKUS submarine of the future. In a letter to the London Financial Times in early March, former senior British Treasury official Phillip Oppenheim noted that “Britain has form on going over-budget on the wrong programmes, which are delivered late,” and cited the Royal Navy’s two aircraft-carriers, 50 per cent over budget and lacking aircraft launch catapults.

As for the proposed AUKUS hunter-killer submarines: “The government has no idea of the cost — not even an estimate — or how many the UK or the Australians will order.” Oppenheim also took a swipe at the “brave talk” of a British pivot to the Indo-Pacific, and the likelihood Britain would send its existing submarines to help defend an Australia that’s richer than Britain, spends proportionately less on defence and “cheerily poaches our doctors and nurses.”

Since this letter, Trump’s call on Europe to defend itself and Keir Starmer’s commitment to helping Ukraine will have turned London’s attention to its rundown army and air defences. The Royal Navy will have tougher competition for defence budgeting.

Still, the zombie has its defenders, and the People’s Liberation Army’s naval division pitched in with its pre-election circumnavigation of Australia by a warship flotilla which then conducted an unannounced live-firing exercise in the Tasman Sea.

Jennifer Parker, a former navy officer now linked to the Australian Defence Force Academy and the ANU’s National Security College, applauds AUKUS as a recognition that “our economy could be crippled without an enemy boot stepping foot on Australian soil.” Defending vital interests requires Australia to project its maritime power far from its shores, she says, and that goal is best met by the speed and range of nuclear submarines.

Parker invokes the late-nineteenth-century strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American “naval Bismarck,” who laid down that “wars are won by the economic strangulation of the enemy from the sea.” But there is no sign the Chinese navy has adopted his strategy. The Mahan doctrine is the ideology of the US navy, intent on being about to bottle-up China by operations close to its coastline. If anyone is going to strangle Australia’s trade with its largest counterpart, it will be the United States, with the Royal Australian Navy expected to assist.

The AUKUS zombie has already consumed about $800 million — the funds thrown into US shipbuilding by Marles on a Washington visit soon after Trump’s inauguration. Greens senator David Shoebridge calculates from budget documents that spending will total A$18 billion over five years.

Marcus Hellyer, of the consultancy Strategic Analysis Australia, found that “submarines clearly exercise a strange hold over our collective imaginations” and that the AUKUS program, including personnel and sustainment, could eventually become a “fourth service” rivalling the navy, air force and army.

Is there an off-ramp for our politicians? A graceful way out might be to tell the Americans that we won’t press for the transfer of three to five Virginia-class submarines due in the 2030s given the US Navy’s reduced fleet and the uncertainties about ramped-up new submarine construction.

Already some AUKUS supporters are conceding that even if the Virginia-class submarines are not handed over, the operation of US Navy submarines out of Australian bases will afford a defence capability pending the introduction of RAN nuclear submarines. As it is, a US Navy submarine seems to have quietly set off to tail the Chinese flotilla as it rounded the Great Australian Bight.

But the decision could be made as soon as a reporter asks Donald Trump: “What do you think of Joe Biden’s idea to hand over some of the US Navy’s much-needed submarines to the Australians, without any promise they’ll join us if war breaks out with China?”

That would force our defence planners to focus on sustaining and perhaps augmenting the existing conventional submarines, along with other defence capabilities, and to introduce some competitive ideas about an eventual nuclear submarine fleet — such as bringing the French back into the picture.

Its brain battered, the Morrison–Johnson zombie might then quietly expire. •

The post Tackling the AUKUS zombie appeared first on Inside Story.

While Australia doesn’t face the same loss of US defence guarantees as the Europeans, or massive trade sanctions like the Canadians, its defence and foreign affairs establishment can now see that the old strategy — dutifully lining up with the Americans in any war, locked ever-tighter in their strategy against China — doesn’t count with the White House’s transactional America First occupant and his chosen cabinet. Nor does a perennial trade deficit with the United States, or even the terms of the Australia–US free-trade agreement.

Despite prime minister Anthony Albanese’s pleading by phone and treasurer Jim Chalmers’s lobbying in Washington, Trump has refused to exempt Australia from the 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium imports. The decision might affect less than $1 billion in Australian exports and the direct economic impact will be minimal, but the symbolism has stung deeply.

Washington’s torrent of decisions has elicited a succession of statements by leading figures in Australian policy circles, conservative and progressive, that would have been unimaginable only a few months ago. Take these examples:

• “The first six weeks of this administration has shown that no agreement is secure,” the former chief of the Australian Defence Force, retired admiral Chris Barrie, told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We’re in a whole new world, and we need to recalibrate Australia’s strategic priorities to reflect the fact that the US is no longer a reliable ally.”

• “Eighty-seven years ago, Neville Chamberlain went to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler,” wrote former Coalition attorney-general George Brandis. “Ten days ago, Donald Trump sent his vice president to Munich to sell out Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. Their objectives were different: Chamberlain’s aim was to prevent a war, Trump’s to end one. Chamberlain, unlike Trump, had no sympathy with the tyrant whom he was appeasing. But the message they sent to the aggressor was, in each case, the same.”

• “The leader of the free world doesn’t believe in the free world and doesn’t want to lead it,” wrote the Lowy Institute’s director Michael Fullilove, after Trump cut off military supplies and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine. “This is not the savvy use of leverage to end a forever war. Rather, it is the capitulation of a president determined to do a deal with a dictator, regardless of the cost.”

• “The lesson is that the US may — or may not — be a reliable ally,” wrote the Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson in the Australian. “It would seem that after being complacent about national security for many decades, most European nations are awakening to the realisation that they cannot rely on the US for security.”

• “The world has long puzzled over his affinity for Putin, the former KGB colonel who seeks to neuter the US, dominate Europe and destroy the West,” wrote the Nine papers’ international editor Peter Hartcher after Trump’s blow-up with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. “But the evidence now is incontrovertible: We should accept that Trump acts as an agent of Putin.”

These weeks have been most shattering of all for Europe, prompting far-reaching changes in strategy. Britain and the continent’s major countries have reaffirmed their support for Ukraine’s fight and hosted Zelensky after his bruising encounter with Trump. The European Union is taking action to raise its fiscal deficit limits to allow massive new defence spending and has adopted an €800 billion plan to enhance European “defence sovereignty” by reducing dependence on US-supplied weapons and satellites.

Germany’s incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, foreshadows extra spending of hundreds of billions of euros. Britain’s Keir Starmer said his government would lift defence spending from the current 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent by 2027 and 3 per cent in the parliamentary term after that. French president Emmanuel Macron plans to lift its spending from the present 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent. Poland’s Donald Tusk is talking of compulsory military service to create a 500,000-strong army.

Further than that, confidence in America’s nuclear umbrella or “extended deterrence” is breaking down, points out New York Times commentator W.J. Hennigan. Tusk told his parliament Poland must now consider reaching “for opportunities related to nuclear weapons,” adding that “this is a serious race: a race for security, not for war.”

Germany’s Merz said Berlin should discuss a nuclear-sharing agreement with France and Britain. While Britain’s arsenal of 225 weapons relies on US technology, the French arsenal of 290 weapons was developed independently under the late president Charles de Gaulle. Macron said Paris is willing to consider extending its protection. Suddenly, Gaullism is back in vogue.

Unease about the US’s “extended deterrence” — designed to deter attacks on allies — is meanwhile deepening in Asia. For more than a decade opinion polls in South Korea have shown that at least half the population wants the country to acquire its own nuclear weapons in the face of North Korea’s nuclear activity and relentless threats; on 26 February South Korean foreign minister Cho Tae-yul said nuclear armament was “not off the table.” If South Korea sprints for the bomb, it could spur other non-proliferation treaty signatories to follow suit, Hennigan wrote. “Japan and Taiwan, regularly facing military intimidation from China, may be forced to reconsider their options.”

In Canberra, at least so far, the reaction has been less vocal. Predictable point-scoring has broken out over whether Anthony Albanese did enough to gain exemption from Trump’s tariffs. It’s become a familiar argument: whether to act tough or suck up. Malcolm Turnbull probably didn’t help by claiming to have successfully used the first approach during Trump’s first term, provoking a social media spat with the president this week.

On the strategic implications of Trump’s treatment of Ukraine, the official reaction has been notably quiet. Australia’s intelligence community is “totally confused,” says former senior defence official Allan Behm. “You just watch what [defence minister] Richard Marles says — it’s circumlocutory defence-speak, so it’s effectively meaningless. If that’s what the deputy prime minister is saying you can be pretty confident that what’s coming from the agencies and the broader community is pretty lacklustre as well.”

For those in the establishment locked into an AUKUS-led defence posture that rests on acquiring nuclear submarines with US and British help, nothing seems to have changed. That’s despite the doubt expressed by Trump’s incoming defence policy official Elbridge Colby that the US Navy will have enough submarines to enable some to be transferred to Australia. One of the optimists, Peter Dean of Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, maintains that “AUKUS at the moment is in better shape than it was under the Biden administration.”

For the plan’s critics, the doubts created by Trump have strengthened calls for a “Plan B” that could entail reverting to conventional-powered submarines or acquiring smaller French nuclear submarines. These critics include Turnbull, former foreign minister Bob Carr and retired admiral Peter Briggs, now reinforced by retired admiral Barrie.

For its supporters, the key element of the US alliance is intelligence-sharing under the “Five Eyes” pact between the Anglophone partners. But Trump’s cutting-off of battlefield intelligence to Ukraine, the implied threat of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet access being denied, and a warning to the British not to share US-derived intelligence with Ukraine has created nervousness in Canberra.

“Closest to the heart of what makes the alliance special is the privileged sharing of intelligence,” wrote Rory Medcalf, head of the Australian National University’s National Security College, in the Nine papers. “No prudent Australian government will seek to jeopardise it. However, it would be irresponsible to imagine that an America First hand on the intelligence tap will never be a problem for us.”

Medcalf went on: “Signals from the second Trump administration raise disturbing questions. A capricious and transactional approach to intelligence sharing will do severe harm to this most trust-based element of security cooperation.”

Medcalf also noted that the pressure to get Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire extended even to ordering a private company, Maxar, to restrict Ukraine’s access to its high-grade commercial satellite imagery. “Even without these developments, intelligence partners may quietly think twice about what sensitive information on Russia they should share with this US administration, given who some of its most senior intelligence consumers happen to be.”

One obvious question is what rights Australia has to the intelligence flowing through the “joint facility” at Pine Gap, the ground station near Alice Springs for US spy and military communication satellites. “I think it’s a question that’s never been asked, intentionally,” says Behm, who took part in negotiations about Pine Gap as a defence official. “In my own experience neither side asked questions to which we didn’t want answers. There are some things that you really don’t want to know.”

Australia does share some intelligence with countries outside the tight partnership with the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. “The handing of intelligence over to non-Five Eyes parties — it is done, but extremely carefully and with no source attribution,” Behm said.

Behm thinks a freeze highly unlikely. “We are a significant contributor and I can’t imagine a circumstance in which Australia would say: ‘We are not going to contribute anymore.’ Nor can I imagine that in the relationship that we have with NSA [the US National Security Agency] it would say anything quite as bold as: ‘We have a directive from the president that we are not to share anything with anybody else.’ Because they would have to anticipate at least the possibility of retaliation, and they of course would acknowledge it. So I hope that both sides would ignore any directive of that kind.”

Medcalf says it’s a time to optimise Australia’s own intelligence capabilities, starting with the overdue release of the public version of an assessment of our intelligence agencies by former senior officials Heather Smith and Richard Maud, which was submitted to the government eight months ago.

“Is our intelligence community positioned for the danger and disruption ahead?” Medcalf asked. “Does it have the funding and the next-generation talent it needs? Do we have the balance right between sovereign capabilities and reliance on America? How are we doing with partners beyond the Five Eyes, such as Japan and Europe? With the private sector now ahead of government in intelligence technologies, what scope for trusted and agile collaboration?”

So far, political or analysis argument in Australia has not echoed the German, Polish and South Korean calls for a non-US nuclear capability, either borrowed or self-developed.

Amid rising alarm about China some years back, former defence intelligence director and ANU strategic studies professor Paul Dibb wondered aloud whether Australia should take steps to shorten the time it would take to produce a nuclear weapon.

“It would not be easy,” Dibb tells me now, “unlike at the end of the Second World War, when we had two senior academic nuclear people, Sir Ernest Titterton and Sir Mark Oliphant, who had worked on the American nuclear weapon. They absolutely understood the technology, and it would have been easy, not least because we had, and still have, 40 per cent of the world’s rich uranium.”

Now, says Dibb, we would be starting with a blank sheet of paper. “Let’s say in the late 1950s or early 60s it might have taken us a year, eighteen months. I don’t have any good information about how many years it would now take now.”

As well as South Korea, Dibb wonders about Japan’s plans. “They’ve got a whole nuclear power industry, with all that implies. They’ve got a space industry, with all that implies. I am told they have stockpiles declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency of enriched uranium and let’s guess that would be no innocent matter if push came to shove.”

Dibb hastens to add that he has no indication Japan is secretly working on such a development. But the intelligence estimates in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that if they were, it would probably take them only eighteen months or so to make a weapon.

Although opposition leader Peter Dutton is proposing a string of nuclear power plants around Australia — despite criticism that it makes little economic sense and is scarcely a timely response to climate change — he has not so far suggested a national security dimension, such as acquiring nuclear expertise or potentially fissile material that could be used for making weapons.

For party leaders facing a federal election within two months, the Trump factor brings a dilemma. For Albanese, open confrontation risks retaliation on any one of several fronts. Yet standing up to Trump has proven an electoral plus for centre-left leaders elsewhere.

Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney have cut back Conservative rival Pierre Poilievre’s 20 per cent poll lead to a point where their Liberal government could retain power in elections due soon. Keir Starmer, once seen as a lacklustre performer, is being called “Churchillian” for his swift action after Zelensky’s dismaying treatment at the White House. On the British right, Nigel Farage is under fire from his Reform Party supporters for his closeness to Trump.

Might it be “No more Mr Nice Guy” and to hell with the consequences for Albanese? •

The post Shellshocked appeared first on Inside Story.

When final submissions were made to the inquiry last week, however, a surprising crack had appeared in the official line that all six men were guilty.

The saga began in February 1979 when a man named Vico Virkez walked into the police station in Lithgow, a small NSW town on the western side of the Blue Mountains. He claimed to be part of a conspiracy by Croatian extremists to plant bombs around Sydney that night.

Ultra-right Croatian nationalists were already suspected of having bombed a Yugoslavian travel agency in Sydney and were known to have engaged in military training on the NSW south coast, so the police were attuned to the possibility of more violence.

Virkez was told to go home, act normally, and wait. Sydney police soon arrived, found crude gelignite bombs in his car, and arrested him. They also arrested Virkez’s tenant, a Croation named Maks Bebic.

Acting on Virkez’s information, police raided two other homes in Sydney — and in each case found half-sticks of gelignite in the possession of another five Croatian Australians: Joseph Kokotovic, Ilija Kokotovic, Mile Nekic, Anthony Zvirotic and Vic Brajkovic. Interrogated at the police’s Central Investigation Branch in central Sydney, the five men confessed to the bomb plot. Back at the Lithgow police station, Bebic had confessed as well.

The case against the Croation Six first came to my notice during a coronial inquiry into a different matter in 2007. I delved into it further for the Sydney Morning Herald and eventually published a book, Spies, Police and the Croatian Six, making the argument that ASIO had withheld evidence that would have exonerated all six of the men.

Until last week, the official line at the inquiry maintained otherwise. But then, at the final hearing, counsel assisting the inquiry delivered a bombshell recommendation to the presiding judge, retired Supreme Court justice Robert Allan Hulme.

According to the pair — barristers Christine Melis and Tali Epstein — there was now “reasonable doubt” about the guilt of the Kokotovic brothers and their in-law Nekic, each of whom had been apprehended in the Sydney suburb of Burwood. But they maintained that the case against Bebic, Zvirotic and Brajkovic still stands up.

Proving who had possession of the gelignite allegedly found at the Kokotovic residence would be difficult, Melis and Epstein argued, and the “admissions” said to have been recorded but not signed around midnight at the CIB were suspect. “When these interviews are compared, they read very similarly to one another, raising a suspicion that they were constructed by police.”

Indeed, the whole case was clouded by problems. “Aspects of the investigation and prosecution into the members of the Croatian Six were affected by procedural irregularities and police misconduct,” they said. “There are inconsistencies in the evidence and starkly contrasting accounts that must be weighed in the balance when assessing the totality of the evidence.”

Making sense of all this was quite balancing act for the duo — as it will for the judge. (Submissions by counsel assisting often give a clue to an inquiry’s eventual finding, but that’s not always the case.) Barristers representing the NSW police commissioner, the individual police involved in the arrests, and the NSW director of public prosecutions have all argued against any doubts about any of the convictions. Barristers representing three of the Croatian Six (Bebic, Brajkovic and the late Mile Nekic, who died in 2022) have argued the opposite.

Melis and Epstein’s account of the case involves playing down evidence contained in a 1991 Four Corners interview with Virkez — who became the main Crown witness against the Croatian Six — by investigative journalist Chris Masters. Rather than being Croatian, Virkez turned out to be a Bosnian Serb named Vitomir Misimovic. He had infiltrated Croatian activist circles under the Croatian name Vico Virkez, he said, and fabricated the bombing conspiracy out of loyalty to Yugoslavia.

He also claimed to have been “blackmailed” into testifying for the Crown with threats to upgrade separate charges against him and  deport him to Yugoslavia. He was sent back to Yugoslavia some months after giving evidence in 1980 and died there in 2014.

But Melis and Epstein found his evidence that he had been drawn into a conspiracy driven by Bebic, Brajkovic and Zvirotic “truthful and reliable.” They also accepted assessments by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police that Virkez had been a mere “informant” to the Yugoslavian Intelligence Service rather than an “agent” under its direction or its “agent provocateur.”

“The inquiry should accept that Virkez insinuated himself in the company of the Croatian Six in Sydney for the purpose of informing on their movements to the Yugoslav Consulate,” Melis and Epstein said. “However once part of that group, he was brought into a genuine conspiracy of the type he described. There is nothing that casts doubt on the overall veracity of his account.”

The case against Vic Brajkovic involved further delicate steps on the highwire. At the 1980–81 trial, Justice Victor Maxwell threw out the admissions police said Brajkovic had made at his CIB interview after learning that doctors and a nurse at Long Bail Jail reported clear signs that he been bashed before he arrived there the next day. Yet a police internal affairs report on Brajkovic’s complaint about the bashing found plausible the claim by four police officers that Brajkovic had submitted himself to assault by the other accused men in the paddy wagon on the way to jail in order to blacken the reputations of the police.

This “collusion,” along with the medical evidence of an assault the officers still deny, “casts doubt” on the testimony the four police gave “both at trial and before this inquiry,” said counsel assisting. The detective-sergeant in charge of the raids, who arrested Brajkovic at his fibro-bungalow on the fringes of Sydney, must also have known about the assault but still denies it.

Counsel assisting also found that a detective from the special branch (the police’s secretive intelligence-gathering agency at the time) who accompanied the arresting police had later substituted a page in his statement to declare that, yes, he had seen a white plastic bag at the house said to contain gelignite.

Nonetheless, they observed that “the unreliability of their evidence in one area does not necessitate a conclusion they were unreliable in all regards.” Even if two of them were falsely claiming that Brajkovic said, “Yes, I make bomb,” when he was confronted with the bag’s contents at his house, four others of the ten police at the Brajkovic house remained untainted. Of the four, though, two were out in the yard at the time, and only one of the other two was invited into Brajkovic’s workroom (and still says he saw the white plastic bag and caught a glimpse of its contents).

Another difficulty for counsel assisting was accounting for the fact that the Crown prosecutor in the trial, the late David Shillington QC, assured the jury there was “not a skerrick of evidence” that Virkez was any kind of Yugoslav spy. This was despite assistant police commissioner Roy Whitelaw learning in March 1979 that ASIO phone taps had revealed Virkez was in touch with a suspected intelligence service officer at the Yugoslavian consulate during the six months before the arrests. Whitelaw told ASIO he was worried this would “blow a hole” in the police case if details of the phone taps got to the “opposition,” meaning the defence.

In the end, they didn’t. But Shillington and Whitelaw, along with Ted Turner, the police detective-sergeant running the prosecution brief, are long dead, so where this ASIO information stopped remains unclear. Roger Cavanagh, a federal police intelligence official, assured a Canberra committee just ahead of the trial that Shillington was “fully informed” about the taps — but Cavanagh is dead too.

In fact, only two links in this information trail are still alive. The first of them is Alistair Milroy, a CIB detective at the time, who took part in the raid in Lithgow that hauled in Virkez and his lodger Bebic. Later, as Turner’s offsider in putting together the police brief, he went to Canberra with Turner ahead of the trial to talk to senior federal police officials about Virkez. He also took part in consultations with Shillington and his team, at least one of them involving the federal police intelligence man Cavanagh.

The other living link is Victor Jefferies, whose brief with the special branch was to watch Croatian groups. He was active in advising the CIB in the hours after Virkez’s tip-off, and helped arrest Zvirotic at his boarding house in Ashfield that evening. Two days after the arrests, he went to Lithgow and interviewed Virkez. He quickly discovered Virkez was Serbian, had another name, was in touch with the Yugoslav consulate and was an ardent Yugoslavian. Jefferies wrote a four-page report, presumably including this important information, which he later showed to Turner. At the inquiry he acknowledged he would have seen the ASIO report on the phone taps.

None of this information surfaced at the committal hearing or the trial. Jefferies testified that his meeting with Virkez had told him “nothing new”; his written report can no longer be found. At the current inquiry he couldn’t explain why he had suppressed what he knew in court.

Jefferies denied having been under pressure from his special branch superiors to withhold the information from the court, though he told the inquiry that earlier incidents blamed on Croatian extremists meant that police couldn’t be seen to “squib or fail to act” on Virkez’s information or ignore the explosives found in his car in Lithgow.

Given the “cogent” evidence that NSW Police were aware of Virkez’s ties, counsel assisting said that grounds existed for a finding that the ASIO information received by Whitelaw was withheld from the appeals court on subpoena. “This decision may have emanated from special branch, as Jefferies was responsible for answering the subpoena,” they said. “There is no other credible explanation as to why the report was not produced on appeal and the denials by Jefferies that this was the intention should not be accepted.”

The withholding of that evidence went all the way up to the top, namely the Crown prosecutor. “On balance,” Melis and Epstein believe, Justice Hulme is entitled to conclude that Shillington was aware of Virkez’s ties to the Yugoslav Consulate. Given that Cavanagh, the federal police official, was not called because they knew what he knew, “it is open to the inquiry to find that a deliberate decision was made not to call evidence from Cavanagh because of what might have been revealed about Virkez’s connections to the Yugoslav Consulate.”

Catherine Gleeson, counsel for the NSW police commissioner, argued that it was not possible to attribute to Whitelaw any motive to conceal, and that Shillington received all relevant evidence but may have concluded the Virkez link to the Yugoslavian Intelligence Service was too slight to mention. “In his absence, no finding is available as to whether he consciously breached his obligations [of disclosure] in this regard,” Gleeson said. And it was unlikely, she added, to have swayed the guilty finding anyway.

Peter Melikan, representing ASIO and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, likewise played down the extent of Virkez’s intelligence links, pointing to documents and notes made in the 1980s that downgraded him from agent to occasional informant. A former federal government lawyer, Ian Cunliffe, has testified that he queried Shillington’s “not a skerrick” comment during this period but didn’t getting much traction among federal Attorney-General’s Department officials.

Melikan’s submission was also notable for his attack on the view expressed in the third volume of The Official History of ASIO that the Croatian Six case was a “wrongful conviction.” Like counsel assisting, Melikan argued that little weight should be placed on Blaxland and Crawley’s contention: “While those remarks evidently reflect the opinions of the authors of The Official History, they are not supported by the evidence before the inquiry, which includes a large volume of ASIO material,” he said. (The book’s two authors, ANU military historian John Blaxland and the Australian War Memorial’s Rhys Crawley, had unfettered access to ASIO’s archives, and the text of their book was vetted and approved by ASIO.)

The inquiry’s counter-narrative came from David Buchanan and Sebastian de Brennan, counsel for the Croatian Six, who have been backed by Croatian community funds and a lot of pro bono work. They pointed to the lack of independent corroboration across much of the evidence. The police had not photographed the gelignite allegedly found at the three Sydney locations, if it was there at all, and had not tested it for fingerprints. Despite being told by Virkez that between 30 and 50kg of gelignite was readied in Sydney, the investigating officers didn’t take the obvious precaution of calling in army experts, clearing neighbourhoods, or searching thoroughly for other explosives after finding only small amounts in the three houses. Those quantities could easily have been planted from a CIB “stash.”

The police bashed the suspects and fabricated their admissions, argued Buchanan and De Brennan. Officers’ statements were then coordinated by arresting squad sergeants in corrupt collusion. Some of the targets listed by Virkez — a water pipeline into Sydney and a district water tank — were “incongruous” given Croatian militant activity had hitherto been directed at Yugoslavian government agencies rather than the community more broadly, which would hardly have helped their cause.

Nor was it clear that Bebic actually possessed the large amounts of gelignite found in Lithgow. He had certainly helped steal it from a construction site, believing it was to be used on an opal-mining trip to South Australia with Virkez. But it was Virkez who had control of it and used it to form the crude packages described as bombs. Bebic had identified the three Burwood men as co-conspirators only after being told to do so by Turner, who used names probably supplied to him by special branch. At the trial, Justice Maxwell then switched the onus of proof by telling the jury it was the word of the six accused, who had a motive to exonerate themselves, against the word of thirty-nine police who showed “detached competence” in the witness box.

The case, according to Buchanan and De Brennan, was a large-scale illustration of what Justice James Wood called “noble cause” or “process” corruption in his epic 1996–97 royal commission into the NSW police. In the eyes of the special branch, the Croatian Six were radical troublemakers. Here was a chance to put them away.

“Anything the CIB detectives heard especially on the night of 8 February from special branch, directly or indirectly, would only have fortified their disgust at what would have been seen as these terrorists and what they had been planning,” Buchanan and De Brennan went on. “Once Virkez had sown the seed of the idea that there was a ‘terrorist ring,’ it likely fell on entirely fertile ground — first and most importantly at Special Branch… and secondly at the elite squads of the CIB.”

Shillington’s “not a skerrick” remark contributed to the unfairness of the trial, they said. “Ultimately, what caused a miscarriage of justice was the NSW Police failure to disclose — the Petitioners would say it was more serious: the NSW Police decision to conceal — the knowledge, largely derived from Jefferies — that Virkez had a motive or motives of his own to serve.”

That was the point at which Whitelaw considered that revealing Virkez’s real motive “could blow a hole right through” the prosecution case. “Not only would the information have discredited Virkez,” they said. “It would have discredited the whole Crown case because what Virkez had told NSW Police was the catalyst for almost everything NSW Police subsequently did and said, and because the police had tried to conceal it.”

In the closing stages of last week’s hearings, De Brennan turned his attention to Roger Cavanagh, the Federal Police intelligence official so assiduous in downplaying Virkez’s connections of the Yugoslavian Intelligence Service. Cavanagh’s work had focused since the early 1970s on alleged Croatian extremism, and in 1973 he had helped raid a Sydney house occupied by Joseph Kokotovic. Yet Federal Police representation and Federal Police documents from the 1970s have been curiously absent from the inquiry.

What is Acting Justice Hulme to make of all this? Throughout the inquiry he has shown a lively and sometimes sceptical engagement with the witnesses, and occasionally pulled up the various counsel. When the police commissioner’s lawyer Gleeson endorsed the counsel assisting’s lavish praise for ex-detective Milroy’s credibility, Hulme butted in. “No one should assume I am of the same mind about his credibility,” he said, quickly adding: “Not saying I’m not.”

Hulme has lamented the fact that the legislation governing such inquiries, the Crimes (Appeals and Review) Act of 2001, expressly excludes the power to compel witnesses to answer questions in return for immunity from self-incrimination. Counsel assisting agreed this needs a legislative fix. “Attempts made by the inquirer to expedite legislative reform to address the legal lacuna reached an impasse,” they reported. (NSW attorney-general Michael Daley has been asked for comment.)

The legislation gives the inquiring judge power to decide whether reasonable doubt exists about the guilt of those making the appeal and by extension the other three, and then send his conclusions to chief justice Andrew Bell. If Hulme does find reasonable doubt he can also refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal for a decision on whether the conviction should be quashed, a retrial being out of the question after all this time.

Hulme can also report to the chief justice any finding of a miscarriage of justice: for instance, a finding that the withholding of vital evidence robbed the accused of a fair trial. In such a case, the Supreme Court might recommend that the state governor grant a pardon under royal prerogative.

With a mountain of evidence to assess, Hulme will probably take many months to prepare his findings. Before closing the hearings, he said he would give as full an account of the case as he could. Because it concerns events forty-six years ago, with some key participants dead, living memories clouded and “powerful arguments pulling in opposite directions,” some of the controversies might be unravelled but others not. “This inquiry is unlike any other that I can recall.”

Three days later federal and state police announced that a large stash of gelignite left with a list of Jewish institutions in a roadside caravan in outer Sydney was part of a fake plot set up for organised crime figures to reveal to authorities so their jail terms could be cut. Police suspected some such plot within days of the discovery on 19 January, but that didn’t stop competitive displays of outrage and calls for stronger anti-terrorism laws from government and opposition politicians. In this case, the police spotted a con job and said so. •

► Hamish McDonald’s account of his role in the successful effort to reopen the case

The post Skerricks of evidence appeared first on Inside Story.

Even before Munich, one of Australia’s most respected foreign policy analysts, Peter Varghese, former head of Foreign Affairs and the federal government’s peak intelligence assessment body, was highlighting the baleful effect of Trump’s bullying of American friends big and small and his crudely extractive trade bargaining.

“Donald Trump may achieve what seventy-five years of postwar Americanism could not: concede the case for moral equivalence,” Varghese wrote in the Australian Financial Review. “Moral equivalence,” he added, “was the accusation that for all America’s claims to the ethical high ground, it was in practice no better than its authoritarian enemies.”

After the Munich shocks delivered by vice-president J.D. Vance, the sense of betrayal was too much for an equally respected figure, economist Saul Eslake. “Do we want to ally ourselves with a people who can knowingly choose people like Trump and Vance to lead them and to be the public face of their country presented to the rest of the world?” he wrote in Pearls & Irritations. These are “people who are willing to ‘cut deals’ with murderous dictators — in much the same way, albeit on a smaller scale, that mob bosses carved out territory in the boroughs of New York, where Donald Trump learned his trade under the tutelage of his father and the likes of Roy Cohn…”

Among politicians in Canberra and other US-allied capitals Trump’s approach is more politely referred to as “transactional.” But Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s highest-circulation newspaper, is even less diplomatic than Eslake, labelling Trump a “mobster” and “grifter” who is creating “a jungle law international order blinded by self-interest and money.” According to an editorial last week, the US president is “blackmailing Gaza, Greenland, Panama and Canada like an organised crime syndicate.”

“He is what the anthropologists and scholars of ancient mythologies would call a trickster,” writes Michael Ignatieff, the writer and former Canadian opposition leader who until 2021 headed the George Soros–founded Central European University, based in Vienna after it was ousted from Budapest by the Hungarian pioneer of “illiberal democracy,” Viktor Orbán. “Tricksters intimidate and unsettle. Barbed humour is the weapon of choice. They have an instinct for what gets under the skin of opponents and a gift for keeping them off balance.” Hence Trump’s needling of the nice Canadians.

Political analysts usually wait the first hundred days to get a sense of where a new United States president is taking his administration. In Trump’s case, it’s clear after not much more than a month that he intends to break and disrupt an awful lot of systems and assumptions, as well as punishing those officials and critics who gave him legal and reputational strife between his two administrations.

Notable among his targets are the multilateral world trade order, a range of international cooperative efforts including the World Health Organization and the Paris climate change agreement and, at least in Europe, the post-1945 Pax Americana. His new secretary of justice, Pam Bondi, has halted application of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, thus signalling that American businesses are free to bribe overseas, and suspended her department’s “kleptocracy initiative,” which had been seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs and other corrupt figures.

But the world order Trump envisages is still hazy, perhaps even in his own mind. And other players are using Trump to push agendas he may discard or pursue.

Many of his goals track those of Project 2025, the manifesto put out by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation last year. Even though Trump disavows any connection, several of his key appointees — including Russell Vought (head of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House), Tom Homan (the “border czar”) and John Ratcliff (the new Central Intelligence Agency director) — helped write Project 2025.

The 900-page program aims to restore the family as the “centrepiece of American life,” dismantle the administrative state, defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders, and secure “God-given individual rights to live freely.” Along with banning the mailing of abortion pills over state lines, criminalising pornography, abolishing the education department, dumping a sweeping range of environmental regulations and cracking down on diversity programs, it would expand presidential power by boosting the number of political appointees and increasing the president’s authority over the justice department.

There is an urgency to this project. “History teaches that a president’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the administration’s opening days,” wrote its former director Paul Dans. Trump, with a stacked Supreme Court and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress (and Musk threatening to “primary out” any dissenters through weight of money in preselection campaigns), is a chance for unprecedented change.

Trump’s appointment of Tesla–X–SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk to an unofficial but empowered “Department of Government Efficiency” has started the demolition of the federal administrative state, with mass sackings and voluntary redundancy offers. Musk is part of an anarchic cabal of tech “bros” urging investment to keep America ahead of China in futuristic systems like AI and quantum computing.

The second group latching on to Trump are what analysts Jeremy Shapiro and Majda Ruge call the strategic “prioritisers” — those who think America’s main game is countering China and distractions like European defence should be ended or drastically scaled back. The key advocates are the defence department’s new policy head, Elbridge Colby, and secretary of state Marco Rubio.

This group is distinct from the “primacists” like Trump’s first-term CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who once set a goal of removing Communist Party rule in China. Pompeo has been banished and his security detail removed on Trump’s orders. Likewise the “restrainers,” who would have confined the US sphere of influence to the Western Hemisphere in a new Monroe Doctrine. Some thought Trump’s early thoughts on annexing Greenland, Canada and Panama were part of such a new isolationism.

Rather than isolationist, Trump’s team are “unilateralists” or a “sovereigntists,” say international relations scholars like Clinton Fernandes at the Australian Defence Force Academy. “Their aim is an illiberal international geopolitical order where domestic political systems resemble ‘competitive authoritarianism,’ with multi-party elections embedded in a rigged legal and political environment,” says Fernandes. “Under this model, the media and the machinery of government are used to attack opponents and co-opt critics.”

Trump wants the United States to set the technical standards governing the global economy, he adds. “Control over these standards creates lock-in effects in finance, telecommunications, space, robotics, bioengineering, nanotechnologies, and advanced materials and manufacturing methods. That means full-spectrum rivalry with China. If economic control is not possible, the plan B goal is global economic separation from China.”

The clearest sign of prioritising is the removal of strategic assurances for Europe. Vance and new defence secretary Pete Hegseth have told Ukraine bluntly that Trump will pursue a peace settlement that involves Russia keeping the territory it has seized and Ukraine being kept out of Nato. The United States might give some protection to the rump Ukraine’s neutrality, but only in return for an extortionate share of its hydrocarbons, rare earths and lithium.

Vance (and Musk before him) also gave open support to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in Germany’s elections last weekend while chiding West Europe for being soft on immigration and abandoning “some of its own fundamental values.” The AfD duly doubled its vote to 20 per cent, making the country’s the second-most-popular party.

After Munich, Rubio met Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh to start negotiations on a Ukraine settlement, with neither Ukraine nor the European Union invited. The two parties agreed to restore staffing at their respective embassies in Washington and Moscow, create a high-level team to support their Ukraine talks, and explore closer relations and economic cooperation. “Should this conflict come to an acceptable end,” said Rubio, “incredible opportunities… exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically on issues of common interest and frankly, economically on issues that hopefully will be good for the world and also improve our relations in the long term.”

With officials working towards an in-person meeting, Trump had a ninety-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin and later seemed to be repeating the Russian line on Ukraine. As former Kyiv and Moscow correspondent James Meek explained in the London Review of Books, Putin has essentially the same aims as were set out in the surrender draft Russian negotiators put to the Ukrainians in Istanbul in 2022. Putin still thinks Ukraine was ready to sign at the time but was talked out of it by Western “warmongers” like Britain’s Boris Johnson.

“Russia has already said that any Western peacekeeping force in Ukraine after a ceasefire is out of the question, but the Istanbul draft goes much further,” Meek wrote. “It demands that Ukraine renounce any defence treaties with other countries, forbid any foreign troops on its soil, give up any missiles or drones with a range of more than 155 miles and reduce its military to one-sixth of its pre-invasion size, with a skeleton force of only 1500 officers. The draft proposed that all Ukrainian units would return to barracks, with their disarmament supervised by Russia.”

Since the 2022 talks, Russia has declared five Ukrainian regions to be part of Russia. “Of these regions, it has complete control only of Crimea,” Meek wrote. “Will America back Russia in trying to force Ukraine to hand over these huge, heavily populated areas of free Ukraine, including the large cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to Putin, without a fight?”

Meeks also noted that “ousting Ukraine’s Zelensky and putting a pliable puppet in place in Kyiv has always been, and continues to be, one of Putin’s war aims.” Trump seemed willing to help out with his comments that Zelensky was a “dictator” with little popular support, afraid to hold an election. Only after global criticism did he walk back these claims.

Putin is also expected to demand the withdrawal of outside Nato troops from all the former Soviet states admitted to the treaty after 1990, effectively leaving the Baltic nations, Moldova and other countries at the mercy of Moscow.

Unsurprisingly, this reduction in American support for Ukraine has been received in Moscow “like Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s all rolled into one,” as Alexey Kovalev writes in Foreign Policy. For Europe it has been a bombshell, prompting an immediate emergency summit of German, French and British leaders. The location of the meeting, in Munich, drew immediate comparison with Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 agreement with Adolf Hitler, struck in that city, which allow the German dictator to take Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia as the price of “peace for our time.”

It is worse than that, says Keir Giles of the London think-tank Chatham House. “In some respects, the danger to Europe’s democracies today is greater, not less, than it was ninety years ago,” he wrote last week in the Financial Times. At least Britain and France were frantically re-arming in parallel with the 1938 appeasement. For decades, the Europeans have relied on American guarantees and run down their forces.

“The popular perception that Russia’s armed forces are incapable of harming Europe because they were eviscerated in Ukraine in 2022 has been slow to dissipate,” Giles wrote. “The fact that Russia’s land forces had been built back bigger by early 2024 is now more widely recognised — as is the way some Nato militaries have become not more but less capable since 2022 as a result of donations to Ukraine not being replaced in inventory.”

He went on: “Looking back at the 1930s, we used to wonder how it seemed that everybody could see war coming but do nothing to stop it. Now we understand, as we see the same mistakes repeated one after another. Instead, credible European deterrence of Russia is key to avoiding disaster. Europe has seen huge investment in countering terrorism by individuals and groups. What it needs now is also investment in countering state terror of the kind delivered by Moscow.”

Despite the European Union’s budget deficit limits and recruitment constraints, its member governments are being pushed into dealing with the Russian problem. Poland — which already spends 5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence and hosting US army units — is the big exception.

Excluding the Europeans from the Ukraine peace talks was not a plot against them, writes Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank: “It is yet another demonstration of Europe’s increasing geopolitical irrelevance.” To became relevant, Europe would have to front up with funds for reconstructing Ukraine, security guarantees (including stationed troops), and sanctions to keep up the pressure on Russia.

It’s not yet the withdrawal of the Roman legions, but Europe is realising it can no longer count on American protection. “We must be prepared for the fact that Donald Trump will no longer fully accept the promise of assistance under the Nato treaty,” said Friedrich Merz, the centre-right leader expected to became Germany’s chancellor after the election. Europeans now had to make every effort to gain the capacity to defend their continent on their own. Implicitly suggesting the US nuclear umbrella was no longer reliable, Merz also said he would seek talks with London and Paris “about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the UK and France, could apply to us.”

Could a “reverse Kissinger” be in play? Provoking Europe to take over its own defence would let the US step back from its European security role and make its long-promised pivot to Asia and focus on its main adversary, China, writes John Blaxland of the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. “Russia evidently features as part of this plan. Trump appears intent to try to cleave Russia from its Chinese embrace in order to either isolate or weaken China. A hard-nosed deal with Russia over Ukraine may well be the price he’s willing to pay to make that happen.” But could Putin ever be held to such a deal?

America’s allies in Asia are meanwhile wondering if they are in for the same treatment as Europe. “It is clear to all of us that we live in quite interesting times, that the assumptions that we have undertaken in last eighty years have now fundamentally changed,” Singapore’s defence minister Ng Eng Hen said after hearing Vance’s speech at Munich, adding — a little more robustly — that America’s image in Asia “has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent.”

After the Russian invasion three years ago, Japan became one of the biggest donors of non-lethal aid to Kyiv, but its conservative government also used the shock to greatly increase military spending, expand its own forces by reinterpreting the non-belligerency clause of its post-1945 constitution, and open military dialogues with Europe, South Korea and Australia.

Trump’s switch on Ukraine has put Japan in a dilemma, says long-time Japan-watcher Tobias Harris. “It will remain dependent for its security on a United States that has ostentatiously abandoned the international order that the Japanese government has articulated is vital for the defence of Japan’s national interests,” he writes, adding that Japan has been “sympathetic to — and committed to — the European countries left behind by the United States.”

Tokyo was appalled by the Vance and Hegseth messages in Munich. “It is important that a just and lasting peace be achieved as soon as possible with the full involvement of Ukraine as a party,” foreign minister Iwaya Takeshi declared, emphasising the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity. A war that ends “with Russia seen as the victor… would send the wrong message not only to China but to the world.” In a hurried visit to Washington, Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba managed to win a joint statement opposing attempts to “change the status quo by force or coercion” in the East and South China Seas and Taiwan Strait.

“Perhaps US allies in Asia can view this is a ‘hard pivot’ from Europe to Asia, the price of an ‘Asia First’ policy,” Harris writes. “But how do they know that Ukraine today won’t be Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan tomorrow?” Still falling short of defence spending demands by Trump officials like Elbridge Colby and knowing its wide US trade surplus to be in Trump’s sights, Tokyo’s resolve faces a test. “Would Japan be willing to invite US opprobrium — or worse — to oppose a US–Russia settlement that rewarded Russia, punished Ukraine, and left US allies in Europe alone to face Russia?”

Tokyo is not yet debating openly, as Berlin is now doing, whether it should develop an alternative nuclear deterrent, though in the recent past Ishiba has cited the need to stockpile fissile material as a reason to reopen nuclear power plants closed after the Fukushima disaster.

The same is not true for South Korea, though its immediate worries reflect Transactional Trump. The US president has demanded Seoul pay US$10 billion a year for the costs of the 28,000 American troops stationed in the south, up from the current US$1.2 billion, as a “tripwire” against North Korea. Korean companies will be heavily affected by the 25 per cent tariff threatened on US imports from Mexico, where Korean cars and electronics are assembled, as well as on direct imports of steel and aluminium.

The South Korean conservatives clinging to power despite the impeachment of their president for trying to impose martial law in December are deeply worried that Trump might resume his courting of the North’s dictator, Kim Jong-Un. They fear he will strike a deal that would involve withdrawing US forces in return for Kim promising to eliminate his nuclear capability, thereby putting the South at risk of a conventional blitzkrieg as happened in 1950. Veteran commentator Shim Jae Hoon says Trump’s sidelining of Ukraine has been badly received in Seoul. “Nothing is impossible from this dangerous man,” one government politician told him.

By contrast, South Korea’s leftist opposition Democratic Party is hoping Trump will do exactly that, and perhaps achieve a lasting peace with the North. Somewhat ahead of the game, it has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The nuclear weapons debate has gone much further in South Korea than in Japan, says Sam Roggeveen, director of the Lowy Institute’s international security program. There, advanced missiles are already on land, surface ships and submarines, so far conventionally armed.

President Joe Biden’s administration attempted to renew “extended [nuclear] deterrence” in 2023 but jitters remain. “What I’d take away is real uncertainty and nervousness in Seoul that the United States is willing, in a crisis, to use nuclear weapons on South Korea’s behalf,” Roggeveen tells me. “So there is real erosion of US credibility in Korea.”

“The same would be true in Taipei — it would have to be,” he adds. “If you were in Taipei and watching Ukraine, you see a nuclear armed great power invading a smaller neighbour — that’s pretty analogous to the problem the Taiwanese face. The Americans are doing an awful lot on Ukraine’s behalf. They sent arms, they imposed sanctions on Russia, gave diplomatic support, intelligence support. But one thing they haven’t done is commit troops. If I was Taiwanese, I’d be drawing the lesson there: we’d get a lot of help from America but we won’t get the exact help we’ve really depended on. Especially none from a Trump administration.”

What does it all mean for Australia? Treasurer Jim Chalmers has gone to Washington to plead for an exemption from Trump’s tariff threats on the grounds of running a big bilateral trade deficit and being a good military ally.

In the strategic relationship, some share the South Koreans fears that Trump might be tempted into deals with North Korea’s Kim or China’s Xi Jinping, unravelling the entire post-1945 setting in Northeast Asia. But others, like ADFA’s Fernandes, see this as highly unlikely. They believe that America’s allies there, including Taiwan, will be seen as vital sentinels keeping China confined behind the “first island chain” and its closely monitored exit channels to open seas.

In Canberra, the bipartisan consensus sees Australia playing a part in this strategy through the ambitious AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine acquisition. Anxious to lock in Trump, defence minister Richard Marles went to Washington with a $800 million down-payment on the US$3 billion (A$4.7 billion) Canberra has promised to help expand US submarine-yard capacity. He seems to have got no assurance that Trump would not ask for more. Asked if the US would deliver the three to five attack submarines in the 2030s, as envisaged under AUKUS, Hegseth said: “I sure hope so.”

It looks unlikely. “Between now and 2032 the US Navy will drop from forty-nine nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs) to thirty-two to thirty-five,” says retired Australian admiral Peter Briggs, a former submarine commander. “The US will not have sufficient SSNs to be able to sell Australia three to five Virginia Class submarines.”

“It’s not clear whether in formal terms this will land on Trump’s desk in the next four years,” says Lowy’s Roggeveen. “But some other preliminary decisions might cross his desk, not the actual sub transfer. If that happens and the national security adviser or whoever is briefing him on that day says that for Australia to get these three to five submarines we [the United States] are going to have to do with three to five fewer submarines — if the bargain is presented to him in those terms, I think the danger is that he will say no.”

On the issue of moral equivalence, many members of the Australian services will be wondering about the ally with which they are increasingly integrated. Hegseth has fired the US military’s judge advocates-general, the three-star military lawyers charged with keeping US forces to the rules of conflict. Hegseth wants to restore a “warrior ethos” among soldiers less restricted by the rules. Trump has sacked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Charles Q. Brown, the second Black American in the job, as well as the first women to lead the navy and the coast guard, Admiral Lisa Franchetti and Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, on the grounds they obtained their posts through now-abandoned diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

On Ukraine and the Middle East, the Albanese government stands with Europe rather than America. Defence sources say the transfer of the Australian army’s older-model Abrams heavy tanks to Ukraine is going ahead this year. Support for the International Criminal Court, threatened with sanctions by Trump, is strong. With recruitment falling behind, the Australian forces need to be inclusive as possible.

The jitters in Canberra’s intelligence agencies, meanwhile, can only be imagined. As Kori Schake of Washington’s conservative American Enterprise Institute points out, they and other Five Eyes intelligence partners are increasingly worried about sharing secrets with the United States. Trump’s new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is an inexperienced wildcard. His administration has offered career-ending buyouts to all CIA staff. Employee information has been put on vulnerable internet connections. The state department office watching out for foreign state-sponsored disinformation has been closed, the Department of Homeland Security has put staff working on foreign influence operations on administrative leave, and the FBI has closed its foreign-influence taskforce. The National Security Agency will likely be next, Schake thinks. All this goes back to Trump’s resentment at investigations into the extent of Russian help for his election in 2016.

Canberra’s US-alliance supporters are “a little shell-shocked,” says Roggeveen. “I wouldn’t expect any kind of public reversal. That’s a bit too painful for anyone to conduct.” But he finds it extraordinary that Trump’s humiliation of Canada and its prime minister Justin Trudeau passed so quietly in Australia.

“When Trudeau addressed the nation, it sounded like a wartime speech,” Roggeveen said. “At one point, in almost a pleading tone, he invokes Canadian wartime shared sacrifice with the United States. And the terminology and the imagery of that section of the speech is almost exactly what you hear one Australian prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister after another say about the US alliance: sacrifice, mateship, we fought together in every war. When you hear it come out of Trudeau’s mouth in those circumstances, you wonder: how much comfort can we now take from that sentiment? The alliance tragics must be thinking: that sentimentality, that values-based alliance, as they would call it, is a fantasy.”

Paul Dibb, the former defence deputy secretary and ANU strategist, sees different implications of the prioritising of China. “It’s not for me to underrate what’s happening in Europe, but for us it’s not all woe and doom,” he told me. If the biggest threat is China, Australia is now much more important in terms of its geographical position than it was when the Cold War was centred on the Northern Hemisphere. With US forces in Guam, Okinawa, Japan and South Korea vulnerable to Chinese conventional missiles, Australia offered a “geopolitical position sufficiently far back, short of nuclear war, to be a massive, stable base for American forward positioning.”

And as Fernandes and others note, whether analysts doubt American assurances and urge greater self-reliance or see a need to do more to keep the Americans happy, their remedy is the same: spend much more on defence. Either way it’s a win for the military–industrial complex.

And these are just the early weeks of Trump’s presidency — though Roggeveen isn’t sure the new administration will keep up the pace. “And exactly how close are Trump’s actions to his rhetoric?” he adds. “At the moment there’s only a vague association between them.” Other centres of power — the surviving bureaucracy, the courts — will impose themselves, as might a big scandal or a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, which hit the second George W. Bush administration. By the congressional midterms, a second-term president becomes a lame duck. “I’m cautious about projecting forward this first month and saying this is it for the next four years.”

For all the wild adulation Trump and the chainsaw-wielding Musk got at last week’s Conservative Political Action Committee festival, their policies are copping a backlash. As US historian Heath Cox Richardson notes, the honeymoon is already over. A new Washington Post/Ipsos poll shows majorities disapproving of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” and of specific policies including abolishing USAID, tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, dismissal of federal employees, and deportation of undocumented immigrants with US-born children. The pardon for the 6 January rioters is especially unpopular, opposed by 83 per cent.

Maybe Eslake’s disillusionment with Americans is premature. But it’s going to be a long four years. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post The unilateralist appeared first on Inside Story.

The idea highlighted a shift in Australian views that has gone largely unnoticed. No longer do strategists in Canberra see Indonesia as a potential enemy. With its population stabilising at around 280 million and no sign that its people are eyeing off Australia’s arid lands — indeed, its government sees the sparsely populated Kalimantan as the place for expansion — Indonesia is now seen as a friendly power worth cultivating. Roggeveen took this shift even further.

The commentary from various specialists in the journal treated his idea sympathetically. Nor, beyond some mention of its military’s human rights record, did they seem fazed by the idea of greater closeness. But they posed the question: what’s in it for Indonesia, beyond the relationship it already has with Australia?

Among the friendly critics was Melissa Conley Tyler, former national director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, who ran four sessions of a “track-two” dialogue with Indonesian representatives between 2011 and 2018. “My clearest memory is the shift I saw over the decade: a clear sense of Australia becoming less and less relevant to Indonesia,” she commented. “While we were working hard to get Australia’s key sector leaders to see the emerging giant on their doorstep, you could almost see the Indonesians’ attention drifting away.”

A leading Indonesian strategist, Evan Laksmana, said Indonesia was unlikely to see Australia as one of the cornerstones of its foreign policy, ranking it below ASEAN, the United States, China, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia as priorities. For Jakarta, the question was whether it was wise, within its long tradition of formal non-alignment, to lean closer to the West. Australia was seen simply as the West’s local branch office.

The point that Jakarta now has bigger fish to fry was emphasised last month when Prabowo Subianto, the former army general elected president last year, was guest of honour at India’s annual Republic Day parade in New Delhi. On the sidelines he was negotiating purchase of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile developed by India and Russia. Earlier in January, Indonesia became a full member of the BRICS association of powers uncomfortable with the America-centred global financial system.

On the other side of the relationship, Conley and others point to a desultory interest in Indonesia among Australians outside the defence forces. The country is Australia’s most popular holiday destination, with 1.37 million visits there in 2023. Beyond holidays in Bali, though, interest doesn’t run very deep.

Trade is well down the list for both countries, at a total of $26.7 billion two-way. Investment is paltry, with only $1.27 billion invested by Australians in Indonesia (and $2.22 billion here by Indonesians). A report commissioned in 2023 by foreign minister Penny Wong from banker Nicholas Moore outlined steps to build up investment in Southeast Asia, but Australian businesses don’t seem to be jumping back into Indonesia, especially as that means to put themselves at the mercy of its corrupt judicial machinery. The recent arrest of Jakarta’s popular former investment board chief Thomas Lembong on a murky corruption charge hardly builds confidence.

In a wider setting, the decline of Indonesian studies in Australia continues. This was emphasised at the end of last year when two big private schools announced they were shutting down Indonesian-language studies. One was Scotch College in Melbourne. The other, much more surprisingly, was the Essington School in Darwin, where Bahasa Indonesia has for many years been a compulsory subject in primary grades and in Years 7 and 8 in senior school.

This is Darwin, a forty-minute flight from Kupang in West Timor and closer to Denpasar than to Sydney. And it’s in the Northern Territory, which has long tried to position itself as Australia’s front door to Southeast Asia.

The federal member for the Darwin region, Labor’s Luke Gosling, an Indonesian-speaker from his army career, says it is a “huge backwards step for government and private schools to be ignoring our huge and strategically important neighbour.” Indonesia was expected to be in the world’s largest five economies by 2040, he said.

“Only half of Darwin and Palmerston schools currently teach Bahasa Indonesia,” Gosling tells me. “In the past, NT governments have prioritised the Indonesia relationship and almost every school taught Bahasa. We also had teacher exchanges between Darwin and eastern Indonesia.” He also sees potential to teach Bahasa in Eastern Arnhem land.

Paul Nyhuis, Essington’s principal, told me the decision was made after long consultations with staff, parents and students, and had aroused little controversy in the school community. None of last year’s Year 8 students had elected to continue with Indonesian. “The student voice had spoken, and the engagement in the recent language has really waned.” The school would now be looking at a more “global” language such as Chinese, French or Spanish for in-school tuition, as well as investigating online language options.

The story is pretty similar elsewhere in Australia. Enrolments in any language at Year 12 dropped from 11.3 per cent of total enrolments in 2010 to 8.2 per cent in 2022. Enrolments in every one of the major languages are down with the exception of Spanish, which is coming up from a low base. Indonesian showed the sharpest fall (47 per cent) from 1161 enrolments to 619. In New South Wales the decline is drastic: from 439 sitting Indonesia in the higher school certificate in 1991 to just seventy-nine last year, despite a small 6.6 per cent bounce in language studies overall in 2024 (which is still only an extra 363 students).

Statistics for study below Year 12 are patchy. Most states have what could be called a token requirement for foreign-language study. In New South Wales, it’s optional at primary schools, and at state secondary schools the only requirement is one hundred hours over one twelve-month period between Years 7 and 10.

“Any teacher that happens to speak a foreign language tends to be designated to teach that language — and that becomes the language policy for that school,” says Sarah Richardson, executive director of Asialink Education at Melbourne University. “It’s almost impossible for a student to start studying a language in primary school and then to continue to study that language into high school, so kids end up with a bit of an introduction to various languages. This feeds into university Asia studies that are also struggling.”

The big exception is Victoria, where in 2011 Ted Baillieu’s Liberal government instituted a policy mandating foreign language study in all schools from foundation year to Year 10. The uptick was immediate. By 2020, 339,124 government primary school students — almost nine in every ten — were learning at least one language. At secondary level, some 43 per cent of all state school students (103,824 of 242,884) were learning a language. Some 181 primary schools and seventy-four secondary schools offer Indonesian.

Why is Indonesian losing popularity? It’s partly evidence of a shrinkage of options at university level. Only twelve universities have an Indonesian studies program, down from twenty-two in 1992. In the 1980s and 1990s, leaders like Bob Hawke and Tim Fischer talked up the importance of Indonesia, recalls David Reeve, a historian and former professor of Indonesian. “At UNSW we were turning students away.”

Then, from 1998, came turmoil and catastrophe in Indonesia: the fall of Suharto, the violent exit from East Timor and resulting Indonesian hostility to Australia, the Bali bombing, explosives at the Australian embassy and a Jakarta hotel, the Aceh tsunami. “Parents didn’t want their kids to study Indonesian because they didn’t want them to go there,” Reeve said.  Schools couldn’t get insurance at reasonable cost for study tours and immersions. “Suddenly at uni, the Indonesian department was a charity case,” he said. “We weren’t earning enough to stay open.”

The gap at higher education has partly been filled by the multi-university Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies and the New Colombo Plan, which since its start in 2014 under foreign minister Julie Bishop has placed more than 12,700 students and young professionals in Indonesia. Fortunately, Indonesian is a language that can be acquired relatively easily for everyday purposes at that age.

At schools, Reeve views the current curriculum content as a bit boring for young Australians: too much classical Javanese dancing and theatre and not enough contemporary popular culture, in contrast to the anime and Murakami novels in Japanese or Gangnam Style and stylish films in Korean. “Indonesia doesn’t market itself, except as a tourist destination,” he says. And along with Essington’s Nyhuis, Reeve thinks a foreign-language capability hasn’t been pushed as an opportunity-enhancing adjunct to other study majors and professional qualifications, rather than as an uncertain pathway on its own to a job.

What all this means is that an initiative started under the Menzies government in the 1950s to prepare Australians for dealing with the tumultuous new neighbour that had suddenly emerged from the Dutch empire, then was kicked along by the Hawke and Keating governments, is now faltering badly, save in Victoria where a Liberal state government partly stemmed the tide.

“While many in government realise that a lack of Asian-language learning is a major problem, there is a lack of political courage to really address this issue properly,” says Asialink Education’s Richardson. She suggests each state could pick one Asian language for study from Year 1 to Year 12, or require students to learn a language consistently through high school, or mandate language study online moderated by teachers.

For Melissa Conley-Tyler, the fate of language teaching helps explain why Roggeveen’s alliance proposal would fail to attract support. “Defence ties alone — no matter how logical or valuable — cannot create the closeness of relationship required,” she commented. “For Australia to matter deeply to Indonesia, it needs to engage in the whole range of issues that preoccupy Indonesian leaders… the health, education, skills, social infrastructure, digital economy, green energy transition and other challenges Indonesia needs to surmount to escape the middle-­income trap.”

Strategic analysts need to broaden their horizons, she said.  “Australia’s security requires the use of many tools of statecraft, not just defence. National security advocates can be a powerful constituency for whole-of-­nation international engagement, which has flow-­on security effects. Australia lacks the political will to do something as simple — yet as game-­changing — as making Indonesian language a compulsory school subject.”

And why not Indonesian? It uses the Roman alphabet, is spelled phonetically, has no tones, is accepted at all levels of fluency (kids could try it out in Bali with their parents, then later on while surfing in Nias or seeking spirituality in Java), and offers pathways notably to Hindi/Urdu and Arabic. Nor does country study imply endorsement of the government involved, as ANU China specialist Amy King was recently at pains to point out. If West Papuans do manage to break loose from Jakarta, their common language would be Bahasa Indonesia, not Tok Pisin.

But compulsory? Politicians quick to insist students study more maths, science, English, computer coding or patriotic history have so far baulked at making a choice that would mean facing down the entrenched teacher cohorts of non-selected languages and the ethnic lobbies. Still, this is surely something federal education minister Jason Clare and his Coalition shadow Sarah Henderson should be thinking about. •

The post Regional drift appeared first on Inside Story.

“The United States — long a key constant in Australia’s international environment —is now the main variable,” he wrote well ahead of November’s election. And after Trump sealed his win, he questioned the wisdom of any optimism based on Australia’s relatively unscathed experience during his first term.

“Trump’s second term will be different,” Scott wrote in Lowy’s Interpreter in November. “He is more influential in the Republican Party, which, in turn, has majorities in both houses of Congress. Trump can also assume a sympathetic Supreme Court, to which he appointed three judges. More importantly, his rapid nomination of committed MAGA [Make America Great Again] loyalists to key positions shows he is better prepared and more determined to radically remake America and, by extension, the world.”

Assuming they are confirmed by the US Senate in coming days, Trump’s nominees for key intelligence and security posts must concern Canberra. Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence seem woefully underqualified, and in Gabbard’s case possibly compromised. Kash Patel has variously threatened to turn the FBI — counterpart of ASIO and the Australian Federal Police in counter-intelligence and counterterrorism — into a museum of the “deep state” or an instrument of political purges.

And locked onto Trump is the Strangelovian figure of Elon Musk, promoting the far right-wing Alternative für Deutschland in the upcoming German elections, and generally disseminating cyber-AI misinformation and slander.

Then there is Trump’s own loose handling of intelligence secrets. Early in his first term, he revealed to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador highly classified information about Islamic State supplied by an ally. After stepping down in 2021, he took boxes of classified documents back to his Florida home and stored them carelessly.

The apolitical professionalism of the US national security bureaucracy was one important safeguard during Trump’s first term, recalled Scott. “But his politicisation of the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, the FBI and other intelligence agencies will necessarily impinge on the close networks of Australia–US cooperation that were least affected during his first term.”

Should Trump make a new, more concerted attack on that apparatus, writes Scott, Australia might need to make discreet changes in security and intelligence cooperation and start looking at the US in a new way. “The national security bureaucracy is not geared towards assessing the United States with the same objective distance with which it views countries such as China.”

American pressure to join a tighter economic and strategic squeeze on China would also put Canberra in a bind. Trump’s nominations for secretary of state (Marco Rubio), national security adviser (Michael Waltz) and UN ambassador (Elise Stefanik) are all China hawks. “An American policy on China that combines economic warfare with a more threatening security posture would pose quandaries in the region,” says John McCarthy, former Australian envoy in Washington, Tokyo, Jakarta and New Delhi.

At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities is Trump’s belief in his ability to make historic pacts with the authoritarian counterparts he admires. “Taiwan is 9500 miles away. It’s sixty-eight miles away from China,” he said in July, adding that Taiwan “took our chip business from us. I mean, how stupid are we?” Thinking aloud further, he said the “immensely wealthy” Taiwan should be paying the United States for protection. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?”

“Trump could abandon allies and cut a bilateral deal with China or blunder into a conflict,” wrote Scott. “In between those two extremes is the scenario that Australia most wants but seems least likely: a set of US policies that would constrain China, balancing its military and economic power without unnecessarily restricting trade and investment.”

Scott is now submerging into a new role and unavailable for further comment, but it is fair to assume his apprehensions are widely shared within Canberra’s defence, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, as well as in political circles, think tanks and lobbies.

On Taiwan, the first extreme would enormously affect Australia’s bilateral commitment to the AUKUS nuclear submarine plan. What would be the point? But we can assume that AUKUS architect Scott Morrison, recently a guest at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo home, bent the incoming president’s ear and got him onside for now, though the transactional Trump can be expected to extract more Australian billions for expanding US submarine yards and then — who knows? — tell Canberra the US navy has no submarines to spare.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the ten security, espionage and police agencies that make up Australia’s intelligence community are waiting on announcements about possible changes. In September 2023 the government commissioned former departmental head and economist Heather Smith and former DFAT and ONA senior official Richard Maude to review their functions. The pair reported last June, and a sanitised public version of their findings and any government decisions are expected soon.

In this period of suspense, Canberra’s end-of-year slowdown was enlivened by the reaction to the inquiry into strategic think-tanks by Peter Varghese, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and director-general of ONI’s predecessor, the Office of National Assessments.

Published just before Christmas, and with the Albanese government agreeing to its main recommendations, Varghese’s report confirmed for Canberra’s China hawks that the inquiry was a “Get ASPI” exercise — a reference to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is funded by the Defence Department and a range of donors including armaments firms.

Notably, Varghese recommended that the $40 million of annual government funding allocated to the half dozen institutes focused on defence, strategic policy and national security (of which ASPI gets about $8 million) be continued for the next two fiscal years but then made contestable for a five-year funding commitment. He also suggested a widely drawn committee of department secretaries should set priorities for research.

On ASPI’s governance, instead of the defence minister appointing its executive director and entire council, the minister would appoint only the council chair and two other members, with the opposition appointing two and the council itself recruiting three others. The council itself would choose the executive director.

None of this was immediately drastic, except that Varghese recommended, and the government agreed, that the ASPI office in Washington — set up by then defence minister Peter Dutton in June 2021 with a special $5 million allocation and opened the next year by his Labor successor Richard Marles — be refused further funding after the current financial year. “Having ASPI freelance in this area only muddies the waters,” Varghese said.

The outrage in the pages of the Australian thundered into the new year. Justin Bassi, the ASPI head appointed by Dutton against the preference of the ASPI council two months ahead of the 2022 election, saw it as a step towards tighter government control of research that might cause diplomatic ripples. He predicted that champagne corks would fly at the Chinese embassy, which some years back showed its irritation at reports on mass brainwashing of Uighurs and influence operations here. Shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson, both self-styled “wolverines” against Chinese influence, said Labor’s plan would “neuter” ASPI.

Hawkish former ASPI head Peter Jennings, whom Varghese had accused of “op-ed overreach,” also fired back, describing the closure of the Washington office as Varghese’s “least worthy” recommendation. “Varghese wants his old shop, DFAT, to be the sole player,” Jennings wrote. “This is just about turf.”

Bassi said the ASPI office would be a vital help in upholding Australian interests by lobbying the US administration and congress during the Trump administration. But how it would do anything other than give Trump ammunition against Australia is unclear: ASPI has consistently argued that Australia’s military is woefully under-resourced and unready for an imminent war with China and, contrary to the Albanese government’s approach, China should be confronted bluntly regardless of economic fallout.

Varghese went out of his way to emphasise he was not advocating cutting ASPI’s funding because of past overreach. “Indeed, the idea that a think tank should be shut down because the government does not like its analysis or the opinions of its executive director is a dangerous one and contrary to the value of policy contestability in a liberal democracy,” he said. “That is why the decision of the previous government to cease funding the China Matters think tank was so regrettable.”

As Inside Story recounted, the Morrison government withdrew funding and tax deductibility for the Sydney-based China Matters institute in 2020, with its eminent business and government council members painted in the News Corp tabloids as dupes of China “lobbying against Australia’s national interests.” The China-watching think tank closed down last year. Some of Varghese’s current critics arguing for diversity of policy advice were instrumental in the funding cut-off.

What has gained comparatively little commentary are signs that Varghese chafed at the terms of reference he was given. “Currently, there remain large gaps in coverage, especially in relation to Australia’s major regional relationships,” he wrote. “It is understandable that the predominance of effort in terms of strategic policy work in the sector has a US alliance focus. But that strategic policy focus should be extended to our strategic relationships with the major powers of the Indo-Pacific such as China, India, Japan, Indonesia and Korea, which get far less attention than they warrant.”

Anyone for an ASPI office in Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi or Seoul? One suspects most of Canberra’s security analysts, if posted there, would find themselves fish out of American water. •

The post Muddied waters appeared first on Inside Story.

The incident being probed dates back to the late 1970s, an era of shaggy haircuts and flared trousers. Large amounts of cash still circulated through payroll deliveries, retail tills and bank branches, inevitably attracting the attention of armed hold-up men and safe-crackers. Powerful new detective squads were set up in its Central Investigation Branch dedicated to ambushing and apprehending them.

It was, as criminologist Robert A. Dielenberg has written, the tail end of the era of “physical” policing aimed at “putting a man in cuffs.” But while that battle still raged on the streets, he says, “gentleman-like” corruption extended “all the way up to government and back down again.”

Nearly half a century later, the detectives from that time are in their late seventies and early eighties. Many require walking sticks and other aids, but as they testify in the Chief Secretary’s Building it’s not hard to imagine them as the young hulks they were in their CIB days.

What happened in February 1979 was outside their usual work of dealing with hard-bitten criminals. Suddenly they had to grapple with ancient Balkan rivalries and hatreds transplanted to the suburbs of Sydney. This was the “Croatian Six” case. At the time it looked like the biggest terrorism plot in Australia’s history; now it looks more like our biggest miscarriage of justice.

In February 1981, after an extremely long trial, the six young Croatian-Australian defendants — Maksimilian Bebic, Mile Nekic, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Anton Zvirotic, Ilija Kokotovic and Joseph Kokotovic — were each sentenced to fifteen-year jail terms by the NSW Supreme Court’s Justice Victor Maxwell. Each failed in their appeals to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal and the High Court of Australia.

The jury accepted police evidence that all six of them had plotted to plant bombs around Sydney to advance the cause of Croatian independence from the Yugoslavia of Josef Tito’s communist regime. The plot was thwarted at the last minute when a seventh alleged plotter, Vico Virkez, tipped off police on 8 February 1979.

A hurried raid on the Lithgow house of Virkez and his tenant Bebic did indeed find crude gelignite bombs loaded up in Virkez’s Chrysler Valiant. After Virkez gave the police more names, they raided three more houses across Sydney where they allegedly found the other men in possession of gelignite, detonators and improvised timers.

But ASIO records released in early 2018, nearly forty years after the alleged plot, cast a cloud over the prosecution case. They showed that phone taps over the preceding six months had found Virkez was in touch with an official at the Yugoslav consulate-general in Sydney whom ASIO believed to be an officer of the Yugoslav Intelligence Service, or YIS.

More than that, this information had been relayed to an assistant commissioner of the NSW Police, Roy Whitelaw, about three weeks after the arrests, along with an assessment that Virkez was an agent or possibly even an officer of the YIS. Whitelaw told ASIO he was worried this information would “blow a hole” in the police case if it got to the “opposition” — in other words, defence counsel. ASIO said he could tell police prosecutors about it as long as it wasn’t sourced to them.

But this vital piece of intelligence never surfaced at the trial or appeal. Indeed, Crown prosecutor David Shillington QC assured the jury there was “not a skerrick of evidence” that Virkez was a Yugoslav agent.

After their release in 2018 the ASIO documents helped launch a fourth application for a judicial inquiry into the convictions by members of the Croatian Six. In August 2022, after sustained opposition from a Crown-appointed legal team, Justice Robertson Wright ordered an inquiry. He cited “questions or doubts” about several aspects of the original case, including the truth of Virkez’s evidence for the Crown, the confessions and physical evidence allegedly got by police in the Sydney raids, and the alleged withholding of crucial evidence from the defence.

In March last year Chief Justice Andrew Bell appointed Acting Justice Robert Hulme to conduct the inquiry. Hulme, a lawyer and retired Supreme Court justice, brought to the job a thorough knowledge of criminal law from both the defence and the prosecution sides —including an early-career exposure to a dodgy police operation when he was secretary to justice James Wood’s 1984 inquiry into the Ananda Marga trio’s convictions in 1the 978 Yagoona bombing, which were overturned.

Since hearings began last December, the inquiry has heard forty-three days of testimony. Searches ordered by the inquiry have generated some 52,000 pages of documents that have been digitised and made easily available on computer terminals, and proceedings have been  live-screened and transcribed for public access.

Facing Acting Justice Hulme are four rows of legal talent. In front is counsel assisting the inquiry Trish McDonald SC and a phalanx of juniors and solicitors. Alongside is the team representing three of the Croatian Six (Bebic, Brajkovic and the late Mile Nekic, who died in 2022): David Buchanan SC, a defence counsel in the original trial who has come out of retirement for the inquiry, barrister Sebastian De Brennan who led the application for review, and solicitor Sharon Ramsden.

In the second row are Greg Woods KC, hired by the NSW Police Association to represent some twenty of the surviving members of the arresting police, and Gabrielle Bashir SC, separately representing James Bennett, another former detective. Bennett left the police soon after the original case for a career as barrister and judge in the NSW District Court, where he still sits post-retirement as an acting judge.

On the third and fourth rows are Alex Brown for the NSW director of public prosecutions and Catherine Gleeson SC for the NSW police commissioner, plus numerous supporting lawyers. ASIO (and latterly the prime minister’s department) are represented by Peter Melican and Jake Silove.

Their fees must be chewing up a bomb — except for Buchanan, De Brennan and Ramsden, who are being funded on drip-feed by the Croatian-Australian community and other crowd-sourcing but have largely appeared pro bono.

The role of the NSW police’s former Special Branch, whose task was to anticipate political violence and spot subversion, came under particular scrutiny. Assistant Commissioner Whitelaw, a previous head of the Special Branch, has died, as has Inspector John Perrin, its head at the time of the arrests. But Victor Jefferies, its Croatian specialist at the time of the arrests, is alive and well enough to stand up to several days of questioning.

Jefferies was quizzed repeatedly about an interview he conducted with Virkez in Lithgow two days after the arrests. During that encounter, he says, he quickly deduced from Virkez’s real name, Vitomir Misimovic, that he was not a Croat but a Serb and not a separatist but an ardent Yugoslav. Virkez admitted to warning the Yugoslav consulate as well as the police about the bomb plot, and having earlier given the consulate reports on Croatian activism, but denied contact with YIS.

Jefferies wrote all this up in a report, he said, which he then gave to Perrin and showed to detective-sergeant Ted Turner and detective senior constable Alister Milroy, leading figures in the Lithgow raid who were putting together the police brief of evidence. But Jefferies said his interest wasn’t sufficiently piqued to explore whether Virkez was an agent provocateur. Nor did Milroy (later chief of the Australian Crime Commission) feel the need to delve into Virkez’s double life when he prepared an “antecedents” or background report on him.

Jefferies also said that the ASIO information about Virkez’s links with the YIS that so alarmed assistant-commissioner Whitelaw would have been circulated to Special Branch and shown to him as the officer watching the Croatian community.

None of this emerged in his statements and testimony at the committal hearing in August 1979, at least according to transcripts shown to him by counsel assisting. Jefferies even denied he had written a report on the meeting or that it had revealed intriguing new information. Why? He’d been in the witness box a long time, he now says, and was “slightly confused.”

Jefferies said he had probably taken the names of the Kokotovic brothers and Mile Nekic from Special Branch records, added them to those of Brajkovic and Zvirotic, who had been named by Virkez in Lithgow on 8 February 1979, and of Joseph Stipic, a young student activist whom a magistrate would later clear of charges because of botched police evidence. This list had then been passed on to teams hurriedly assembled at the CIB to fan out across Sydney late on the evening of the raids.

But Jefferies denied he and his chief, Inspector Perrin, had seen Virkez’s information as an opportunity to “roll up” the members of a strident new activist group, the Croatian Republican Party. These young nationalists had mounted heated demonstrations at Yugoslav national day events, and in one case had nearly rolled a police car containing Perrin after he had arrested Brajkovic at a demo outside the Yugoslav consulate.

Despite the decades that have elapsed, the ex-CIB stalwarts who appeared at the inquiry all stood by their evidence at the original trial. Yes, they had found the gelignite at the Sydney homes. No, the defendants had not been bashed during questioning back at the CIB offices in the old Remington Building facing Hyde Park. Yes, their evidence of confessions was true.

They had heard the term “verballing,” they said, but mostly from defence lawyers trying to wriggle their clients out of confessions. They’d never done it themselves, or seen it done. Same for “loading up” suspects with guns, explosives or drugs. Same for bashing. If they’d noticed the Wood royal commission report on police corruption in 1997, they were shocked or felt it generalised from isolated incidents. Some still attended an ex-CIB get-together held three times a year; while they may have mentioned to each other that they’d been summoned to this inquiry, they definitely didn’t discuss what they were going to say.

At one point Acting Justice Hulme professed himself puzzled by this combination of gaps in memories and vehement denials of misbehaviour. “If you have no recollection, what’s the basis of your denial?” he quizzed one ex-detective.

James Bennett, the detective turned judge, gave the narrative some refinement. He took issue with the proposition that a load-up could only succeed if all the police involved in a raid knew about it. He agreed with his counsel, Gabrielle Bashir, that an officer, unaware of a load-up, could be shown an incriminating item planted by another officer at the raided premises and then give corroborating evidence of having seen it there.

Justice Victor Maxwell was clearly not thinking of such a scenario when he told the jury in January 1981 that the trial came down to a “black and white” proposition: the word of the six defendants with a motive to exonerate themselves against that of thirty-nine police who would all have had to be involved in a conspiracy to plant or fabricate evidence.

Could such a scenario be applied to Bennett’s own role in the Brajkovic arrest? More senior police allegedly found a white plastic bag of explosives on the ground outside the house where Brajkovic was found and detained, brought the bag inside and invited Bennett to look at it. Bennett was not asked about this possibility.

Also raised quite a few times during questioning was the term “scrum-down,” which describes officers conferring on their evidence ahead of trials — a practice that could be used for good or bad, Wood found. Although most of the ex-detectives looked baffled by the term, counsel assisting, Trish McDonald, thought she had found one example..

After his arrest and questioning, Brajkovic showed signs of a severe bashing to medical staff at Long Bay Jail. Their testimony at a non-jury hearing during the trial caused Justice Maxwell to throw out the “admissions” police swore he had made voluntarily. Brajkovic also wrote to premier Neville Wran, who also held the police portfolio, and the police Internal Affairs Branch was ordered to investigate.

McDonald found it “beyond coincidence” that four officers accused by Brajkovic, when questioned by Internal Affairs, used almost identical language to allege Brajkovic must have willingly taken the blows from the other alleged plotters, sometime between being put in the Central Police Station cells after questioning and delivery to Long Bay, as part of a plot by the prisoners to discredit police. “This is an instance of a scrum, for corrupt purposes,” she put to one of the officers, which he denied.

Nonetheless, a Detective-Sergeant Shepard of Internal Affairs found that prisoners inflicting injuries on a willing Brajkovic “would not be beyond the realms of possibility” and dismissed the complaint. Brajkovic said he never received this finding, and when shown it at the inquiry appeared shattered by it. It was noted, Shepard delayed his report until after the trial to see what Judge Maxwell made of the allegations. Yet, as Acting Justice Hulme noted, Shepard didn’t mention that Maxwell had excluded the record of interview with Brajkovic because of the revealed injuries.

“Curious,” Hulme commented.

As for admissions to the media in 1991 by the leader of one of the raids, Roger Rogerson, that verballing and loading were standard procedure — well, this was just big talk. They had never seen Rogerson practise those techniques; he became “bitter and twisted” only after being transferred out of the CIB. (This despite some of them having been with Rogerson in June 1981 when he shot dead drug-dealer Warren Lanfranchi in highly contentious circumstances. Four of them also worked with Rogerson on the discredited Ananda Marga case).

Rogerson, who was serving a life sentence for murder, died in jail in January this year. Though he might otherwise have been called to testify to the inquiry, it seems unlikely, even with nothing left to lose, that he would have broken ranks and given a different version of events from his former colleagues.

One striking thing the testimony to the inquiry has revealed is a general lack of what nowadays would be considered sound detective work when the original case was being investigated. None of the explosive material allegedly seized in the Sydney raids was fingerprinted or even photographed in situ. Only the Scientific Squad had cameras, and they had gone home for the night. The “elite” CIB squads had no tape recorders for their interviews, not that they wanted them. Accounts of where the explosives were stored were vague, putting the custodial chain under intense scrutiny.

And despite the raids supposedly being targeted at suspected terrorist bases — the briefing at CIB had warned about the risk of trip wires, booby traps and primed explosives, one ex-detective said — the CIB squads failed to call in army bomb experts, clear the neighbourhoods or take any precautions. Most of the detectives attended in suits rather than protective attire and didn’t even have torches to search for the alleged explosives.

Buchanan, for the Croatian Six petitioners, put it to the police that they had pulled the incriminating explosives from stashes kept to load up suspects and brought them to the raided premises. Lydia Peraic, who was married to Joseph Kokotovic at the time, told the inquiry she had never seen the two half-sticks of gelignite that Rogerson’s team had allegedly found in the attic workroom of the Kokotovic family home at Burwood and showed the family.

But if any of the officers had thought of confessing to concocting or withholding evidence, Hulme at one point reminded counsel that unlike a royal commission, an inquiry like this under Section 79 (1) of the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act 2001 gave him no powers to compel answers or to grant certificates of immunity against self-incrimination. “It’s an unfortunate state of affairs,” Hulme said. “I do not understand why parliament would choose to exclude the power, but they have.”

The testimony extended beyond the actions of NSW police. Veteran lawyer Ian Cunliffe was given the chance he’d been awaiting for more than forty years to expound in court about the questionable handling of the Croatian Six case by the Australian Federal Police (known until October 1979 as the Commonwealth Police) and security officials, suggesting that the suppression of evidence reached right into Canberra. (It was from Cunliffe, at a coroner’s hearing in 2007 on a different matter, that I first learned of doubts about the original trial.)

Cunliffe, who had been attached earlier to Justice Robert Hope’s inquiry into the intelligence agencies, was a middle-ranking legal advisor in the prime minister’s department. The Croatian Six case came across his desk in March 1980 in the form of a letter from the jailed Virkez to prime minister Malcolm Fraser. It was accompanied by a “whitewash” response drafted by the Australian Federal Police’s assistant commissioner, Roy Farmer, once a detective in the NSW Special Branch.

Cunliffe’s interest was piqued by Farmer’s response, which pointed to negotiations under way between Virkez and prosecutors. Virkez would eventually plead guilty in a separate trial, receive a short sentence, and then testify for the Crown in the trial of the other six in return for early release and deportation to Yugoslavia.

Throughout this time, AFP civilian intelligence official Roger Cavanagh (now deceased) had been visiting Virkez in his cell and meeting Detective-Sergeant Turner, the NSW officer running the case. Cavanagh’s career had flourished on the back of alarm about Croatian political violence, most publicly when he accompanied Labor federal attorney-general Lionel Murphy on his controversial “raid” of ASIO headquarters in Melbourne to see if the security service was hiding material about Croatian terrorism.

Cunliffe detailed the workings of a high-level interdepartmental committee convened to discuss the Virkez letter. Cavanagh told the committee that evidence about Virkez’s YIS connections would be made to disappear if it was subpoenaed, that Turner was not interested anyway, and that Crown prosecutor Shillington was “fully informed.” ASIO’s representative, Michael Boyle, disputed draft minutes of the committee meeting in order to “water down” his comments about Virkez having serious YIS connections.

Later, when he read a press report of Shillington’s “not a skerrick” comment in the closing stages of the trial in early 1981, Cunliffe wrote a memo to his superiors in the prime minister’s department warning that the federal government could be seen as “standing by” while a miscarriage of justice occurred. Either Shillington (who died in 2018) had misled the court, or communications had broken down.

Cunliffe also contacted a defence lawyer to tell him that evidence existed that would help an appeal, though he didn’t disclose what it was. Although he received a subpoena to appear at the appeal, he was not ultimately called. After taking up a new job as secretary of the Australian Law Reform Commission he raised his concerns about the miscarriage of justice in 1984 directly with the Hawke government’s attorney-general, Gareth Evans. He was passed on to acting federal crown solicitor Tom Sherman, who showed him the relevant files.

But Sherman’s report on this meeting said Cunliffe was “satisfied” that all relevant documents had been provided to the court. “I am very confident I didn’t say that,” Cunliffe told this year’s inquiry. Instead, he was expecting a full federal probe. But that didn’t happen, despite further confidential correspondence involving Evans’s successor, Lionel Bowen.

During Cunliffe’s testimony, Acting Justice Hulme asked him whether he thought that not only had a miscarriage of justice occurred but also that the Croatian Six should have been acquitted.

“If the jurors were told what I knew, they might have been acquitted,” Cunliffe said.

“Not withstanding other evidence?”

“Yes,” replied Cunliffe.

Michael Boyle, the now-retired ASIO official involved in the 1980 Canberra meetings, denied he had watered down the assessment of the Virkez from “agent” or possible “officer” to “informer” for the YIS. It was simply a reappraisal as further information was gathered, he said. An agent was someone who was managed or controlled by an intelligence service.

Unlike the Soviet spy agencies, the YIS was not a priority target of ASIO interest. “They weren’t actually threatening Australia’s national interests,” Boyle told the inquiry. “They were threatening Croatian interests. The Yugoslav government was a neutral but friendly power, and there were very close diplomatic relations with them. We were aware of the Yugoslav Intelligence Service interest in the Croatian militant organisations, and we were aware of the threat that the… those organisations occasionally posed to the Yugoslav government and its interests.”

Yet an ASIO report written in 1984 by an analyst identified only as S5-A and tendered to the inquiry, concluded that Virkez was an “agent” of the YIS reporting to YIS officers at the Yugoslavian consulate-general in Sydney, rather than a “low-level informer” as claimed by the Australian Federal Police (and put to the appeal court in 1982 by AFP intelligence officer Cavanagh). A 1982 report from a redacted source (probably an allied intelligence agency) quoted a YIS officer as saying Virkez had been “planted” into the Croatian community by the consulate.

While there was no evidence on file that the YIS “masterminded” the Lithgow plot, the analyst S5-A said,

It is my opinion (based only on professional judgement) that Virkez was central to a YIS plan to discredit a potentially violent Croatian organisation, the HRS [Croatian Republican Party]. I don’t believe the YIS actually wanted bombs to be planted but I do believe they wanted HRS leaders arrested with bombs or implicated in the plot. The aim, ie that Croats, particularly HRS members, be discredited, was very successful. The arrests and trial split Croatian separatist groups and destroyed the HRS. No separatist group operates without the fear of YIS penetration, following the exposure of Virkez as an informant. Suspicion amongst separatists, of each other, has meant that cooperation and unified action is impossible.

In the last days of the hearings, Brajkovic underwent hours of intense cross-examination by counsel assisting the inquiry, counsel for the police, and counsel for Bennett, about his narrative of the arrests, the interrogation, the police inquiry, and his own political history.

He stuck to his account, and gave a sense of what it felt like at the time for the Croatian Six as they awaited committal. “We are very, very deeply surprised because we are so much have our Australian way of life… at our heart, and after the things happened we couldn’t believe it,” he said. “We thought originally it will go probably one, two, three weeks and after that we’d be released, but it kept continuing, kept mounting new charges, and we lost any hope.”

Whether hope is revived for the surviving Croatian Six and the Croatian-Australian community may become apparent after counsel assisting Trish McDonald SC makes her written submission in mid-December, counsel for the petitioners and other parties write submissions in reply, and then all make final oral submissions in the open inquiry over 5–7 March. Forty-six years after the events under scrutiny, it will then be up to Acting Justice Robert Allan Hulme. •

► Hamish McDonald’s account of his involvement in the successful effort to reopen the case

The post Is this our biggest miscarriage of justice? appeared first on Inside Story.

It is usually a one-way street. In the decades since 1945, Billy McMahon is the only foreign minister who has gone on to win the prime ministership. Doc Evatt became Labor’s opposition leader but failed to enter the Lodge. Of the others, the more intellectually prepossessing — Dick Casey, Paul Hasluck, Bill Hayden — were appointed governor-general. Others — Gordon Freeth, Alexander Downer, Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd — were given a good ambassadorship.

Then there is Australia’s recent succession of female foreign ministers. The first two — Julie Bishop and Marise Payne — battled to get heard in cabinet, in part because of the blokey mansplaining that pervades Australian politics (as much else).

Bishop has said that colleagues started looking at their phones when she began speaking, and then sometimes repeated her idea as if they had thought of it themselves. She was forced to diminish her department by dissolving AusAid and absorbing its remaining staff, though she did get the New Colombo Plan started.

Marise Payne was too factionally moderate to hold much clout with her prime minister, Scott Morrison. She had a hawkish adviser inserted into her staff to ride shotgun, and then that ex-robodebt enforcer, civil servant cum Army Reserve general Kathryn Campbell installed as her department secretary despite possessing little foreign experience.

But Wong is different.

On moving from Sabah to Adelaide as an eight-year-old with an Australian mother whose marriage to a Malaysian architect had broken up, she won a scholarship to a top private school. She excelled at studies and debating then took a good law degree, advocated for a trade union, and from 2001 gained and held a seat in the Senate, elbowing aside senior colleagues on three occasions to get a winning place on the ticket.

She aligned herself with Anthony Albanese’s powerful left faction and was instrumental in his selection as Labor leader after Bill Shorten’s defeat at the 2019 election. When Labor won office in May 2022 she was given her pick, foreign affairs, but retained a second role as government leader in the Senate that kept her across most policy areas. Coming into government with authority, she immediately had Campbell replaced as her department secretary.

Unusually for a foreign minister, her next moves on foreign policy could conceivably turn the 2025 election, which is widely predicted to result in narrow margins and enhanced power for crossbenchers.

After the atrocious Hamas break-out from Gaza and the harsh Israeli military response, Labor has come under intensifying pressure to recognise a Palestinian state. The young Western Australian senator Fatima Payman quit Labor over the issue. Muslim voters in hitherto secure Labor seats have threatened to run separate candidates. The NSW Labor machine worries that more seats will opt for a locally based candidate, echoing the election of independent Dai Le in Fowler in 2022 after the party complacently parachuted former state premier and senator Kristina Kenneally in from her northern beaches home.

In a wide-ranging speech at ANU’s National Security College in April, Wong said the international community was “now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution.” Norway, Ireland and Spain had recently recognised Palestine, and reports suggested Britain’s then foreign secretary, David Cameron, was considering following their lead.

Speculation intensified that Australia might follow suit, possibly alongside Canada and other allies. Wong depicted recognition, and a reformed Palestinian Authority, as the way to rob Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran of their cause and ultimately help secure Israel. Recognition would come at the start, not the end, of serious negotiations.

Having flown that kite, Wong and the government have hung back in public, focusing on immediate goals: ceasefires, release of hostages, aid to civilians. But intense work on recognition continues behind the scenes in consultation with other governments.

Labor’s former foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr urges the Albanese government to move quickly. “It would be a major failing of the government if it goes to the next election and it hasn’t recognised Palestine,” he tells me. “If they face minority government it would be an indigestible piece of unfinished business. If they move then it will look like they’re only doing it to get support from the crossbenches. It will look like the election result forced them to do it.”

If she agrees with that timetable, Wong hasn’t been able to convince her cabinet colleagues. On one hand, the government has come under fire from the Israel lobby and an almost unprecedented campaign by the Australian for “betraying Israel” and failing to protect Jews from antisemitism. On the other, Wong was heckled off the stage last week and accused of condoning genocide by pro-Palestinian protesters during a speech at the University of Tasmania.

That must have felt doubly unfair. Getting deeply involved in the Middle East snake-pit was never part of the agenda Wong set herself as foreign minister. In her six years as shadow foreign minister she’d had long talks with one of her Labor predecessors, Gareth Evans, with eminent former foreign policy and defence officials Hugh White, the late Allan Gyngell and Michael Fullilove, and with ANU economist Peter Drysdale and other academic specialists.

They instilled a deep appreciation of Labor’s post-Vietnam tradition of “security in Asia, not security from Asia,” active engagement with the region without a constant desire for American approval, and an emphasis on diplomacy rather than a defence–security approach. For much of this time her staff included a persuasive exponent of that viewpoint, the former senior defence official and Indonesianist Allan Behm.

Wong started work with an emphasis on the “centrality” of the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, making Indonesia her first destination and then visiting each of the other member states save for the junta-ruled Myanmar. Steadily she clocked up visits to all the members of the Pacific Islands Forum. Her aim was to re-engage on more respectful, less prescriptive terms than the previous government.

“She had a lot of mopping up to do,” says Janelle Saffin, a former Labor federal MP now in the NSW parliament who has deep connections in Myanmar, Timor-Leste and other parts of the region. Wong’s ethnicity undoubtedly helped, especially in Southeast Asia.

No problem more urgently needed attention than relations with China, which had been put into a deep freeze under Malcom Turnbull and Morrison. Ministerial visits had stopped, and China had blocked about $20 billion worth of annual Australian exports. Wong laid down a goal of “stabilising” the relationship, a term used again and again.

“When the Coalition was in power it was like every backbencher would talk about China — everyone chipped in,” says an insider who watched the transition. “When the Labor government came in, only very senior ministers were authorised to talk about China. The message was super-disciplined.”

The shift steadily yielded dividends for Wong and trade minister Don Farrell, another South Australian senator, helped perhaps by a growing realisation among China’s leaders that their punishment had failed to do anything but make unnecessary enemies. For them, Labor’s arrival was a convenient off-ramp.

Beyond “mopping up” and stabilising, though, Wong’s efforts to widen and deepen Australia’s interests in Asia have had limited success. She commissioned former Macquarie Bank chief Nicholas Moore to investigate why Australia’s investment in Southeast Asia was lagging that of Canada, the United States and other comparable economies, but big companies and banks don’t seem to have rushed to follow up his recommendations. She asked former Victorian premier Steve Bracks to come up with a plan for the long-stalled Greater Sunrise gas project shared with Timor-Leste; a year later, the deadlock remains. Indonesian-language studies continue to dwindle in schools and universities. An offer from Jakarta for teacher exchanges has not been taken up.

Meanwhile, media coverage of Southeast Asia has shrunk, most recently with the shuttering of the Australian Financial Review’s Jakarta bureau ­— once sustained by the Judith Nielson Institute — despite the looming presidency of the notorious Prabowo Subianto.

To be fair, these are all long-term trends, and they will take sustained effort by many arms of government to turn around.

What Wong has won is an expansion in her department’s total budget, from $7.68 billion in the Coalition’s 2022–23 budget to $8.93 billion in the current 2024–25 year, with staff numbers growing from 6475 to 6949. But Behm says it would take an extra $3 billion to restore the real spending power of the aid program alone to where it was before the Coalition took power in 2014. With many understaffed posts, Australia’s diplomatic footprint remains quite thin. The defence budget, by contrast, rose by $7.4 billion to $55.7 billion over the same years.

Behm, who is now at the Australia Institute, thinks Wong and her department are battling to prevail against the views of the Office of National Intelligence, or ONI — still led by Andrew Shearer, who was described by Labor as “too partisan” when he was appointed by Scott Morrison but nevertheless retained by Albanese — and of the China-hawkish wing of the defence establishment, echoed by defence minister Richard Marles.

“Senator Wong knows that the so-called China threat is over-played,” says Behm, whose recent book The Odd Couple argues that a US retreat is a more pressing risk to the rules-based order. “China generates lots of risk, but the idea that it’s threatening invasion is farfetched. Yet she finds it very difficult to hose down that narrative. My feeling is not that Penny is captured by ONI and the right, it is that she hasn’t got enough support in the cabinet to push back hard enough against them.”

Albanese’s focus on the factional demands of federal caucus adds to the problem, says Behm. “He’s a good bloke to deal with, but way too cautious and not quick enough on his feet: you can feel that from his language. Put those things together, too much caution and too little agility, it’s pretty hard for somebody who is brainy and agile, like Penny, to get much cut-through.”

What the defence–intelligence combine is pushing is counter to the foreign policy Wong spelt out at the ANU National Security College. Hers is a policy that is active, exercises agency and contributes to “the balance of power in our region — so no country dominates, and no country is dominated.” Her aim is “a region free of hegemony. A region in balance. Where countries, large and small, have the freedom to decide our own futures. Where we operate by the same rules, and we have space to agree and to disagree.” She paid tribute in the speech to America’s “leadership” rather than its power.

This dichotomy in Australia’s strategic policy was picked up recently by former departmental secretary and top intelligence official Peter Varghese. “On the one hand, our foreign policy embraces a multipolar future where no country dominates,” he told Melbourne University’s Asialink. “Our defence policy, on the other hand, quietly conflates US leadership and US primacy, and is increasingly fixed around doing what we can to ensure the retention of US strategic primacy.”

Yes, Chinese hegemony has to be opposed, “but constructing a stable China-constraining balance does not turn on the retention of US primacy, although it certainly requires the US to be a keystone of that balance,” he said, adding: “Or to put it another way, the loss of US primacy may be regrettable, but it does not pose an existential threat to Australia. To assume it does is to handcuff ourselves to whatever the US decides it must do to retain its primacy. Those strategies may make sense for the US, but they might not always be in Australia’s national interest.”

No aspect of this defence push has been more contentious than the tripartite AUKUS agreement that Morrison sprung on Albanese some twelve hours before he announced it in a videolink with US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Boris Johnson. The pact has since been hammered by a host of Labor eminences, including Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Bill Kelty and Bob Carr, as well as by Melbourne University’s Ross Garnaut, Sydney University’s James Curran, the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen and other strategic thinkers.

These critics see the pact abandoning the post-Vietnam “defence of Australia” principle in favour of the old “forward defence” model of helping big allies counter distant threats. If American nuclear submarines are spared for Australia’s navy, they say, it will be on the understanding that they operate as part of the US Navy, against China if required. As for the future British–Australian submarine, it may never happen, say defence technology experts like Derek Woolner, given that British shipbuilders have other priorities.

As well as a loss of sovereignty, critics see other downsides. “We have not only withdrawn from confident interaction with China, but from deep interaction with other Asian and Pacific countries as well,” Garnaut said at a recent Australian Academy of Sciences forum on AUKUS, adding: “We have drawn closer to US defence and strategic policy, which has had positive elements, but has also contributed to reduced intensity of interaction with our closer neighbours. Some strands of support for AUKUS can be seen as a contemporary reflection of yearning for security in the old and familiar [in] a changing world.”

While Wong herself is appreciated in Asia, says Behm, “they can’t work us out. My contacts in Malaysia and Indonesia are telling me they are very puzzled by us. They can’t see why we are welding ourselves even more to the declining ascendancy of the United States,” and still more to a wider Anglophone embrace including Britain. Curran, who is also the Australian Financial Review’s international editor, recounts the remark of a French official: “I can understand why you went back to Uncle Sam, but I cannot understand why you have gone back to Mummy.”

This is a fence Wong has had to sit on. But she has managed to make some gains against those who see everything through a military prism.

In June, she led a ministerial team to Papua New Guinea with attorney-general Mark Dreyfus and then home minister Clare O’Neill. The focus was on domestic security, programs to build up the capacity of PNG’s police and judicial system, and human development. Marles, and worries about the Chinese, were conspicuously absent.

Albanese was also persuaded to have Varghese review government funding for security and foreign policy think tanks. Seen by Canberra hawks as an effort to “get ASPI” — the government- and defence industry–funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute that has been hearing the same “drums of war” detected by disgraced home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo — Varghese’s report is imminent. While it is not expected to recommend cutting ASPI’s funding, it is likely to suggest its leadership be appointed by an independent panel rather than the defence minister.

But the AUKUS agreement remains. What happened inside the meeting of Albanese and senior frontbenchers when Morrison sprung the AUKUS plan is known to few. One source close to Wong tells me that Albanese mainly focused on avoiding a “wedge” on national security, a field traditionally seen as a Coalition strength. Wong favoured holding back, suggesting a response along the lines of: well, this is an entertaining idea; we’ll look at it when we’re elected. “But they didn’t want to look at it,” this source said. “They didn’t want a continuing fight in the first six months of their government, and to be left with the original bloody albatross, reeking, around their necks.”

If this version is true, there must now be regret that Wong’s idea was not taken up, or that the AUKUS plan wasn’t scrutinised rigorously once Labor took office. It has still not been explained fully and justified, either to parliament or the public. The conditions Albanese sought for his assent — that the submarines would not be nuclear-armed, that non-proliferation would be upheld, and that no onshore nuclear reactors were required — pale beside the ongoing criticisms.

And Morrison was in a weaker position than they knew. He had assured Biden he had bipartisan agreement. Had Labor demurred, the announcement might well have been postponed. “It was a gamble on Morrison’s part,” said one retired senior foreign policy official. “Albo could have said: we can’t answer by 7am tomorrow. If you’ve told Biden otherwise you have to tell him we’re still thinking about it. Maybe Morrison could not have gone ahead.”

Inevitably, word would have got out and French president Emmanuel Macron might have found a way to scupper the project. America’s respect for France, a power in Africa and the Middle East as well in Europe, is often underestimated in Canberra. While Morrison might have had wedge possibilities in mind, he and his tight circle may also have considered an ambush the best way to get Labor across the line, avoiding a Labor backlash engulfing Albanese if assent was delayed.

For Wong, Albanese’s embrace of AUKUS and his obvious enjoyment of mixing with American, British and allied leaders — as well as a seeming tin ear for patronising statements like being “left the lane” for police development in the Pacific by US official Kurt Campbell — must rub uneasily against her personal loyalty. “Loyalty to him as a factional chief blocks out a left-wing instinct to challenge a federal Labor government on these security issues,” said one Labor figure. “None of his career prepared him for being prime minister.”

But that’s Albanese, “a political operator rather than a visionary,” as Curran puts it, whose “inability to persuade and sustain arguments is beginning to show.” Having appointed an international ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed, Wong would have been particularly struck by the PM’s failure in last year’s Voice referendum.

Being foreign minister may be the apex goal she has set for her political career. Going further, if she desired it, would require a switch to the lower house, which her factional position would make possible. She may be respected rather than liked: her biographer Margaret Simons reports epithets including clever, aggressive, ruthless, emotional, hard-working, chip-on-shoulder, sensitive on race and gender, different, smart, having integrity, a control-freak and scary. But a lot of that is in the make-up of many leaders.

Some of her mentors sense she has been downcast in recent months, with “the fight gone out of her” as one put it, and unusually quiet, as another said. Simons reported that she was thinking of leaving politics after the 2019 election defeat. With two daughters getting towards high school, she must be drawn more to home and family as well. If Labor, and Australia to her way of thinking, suffers the ignominy of a Peter Dutton win next year or goes into even more timorous stasis, she will no doubt think again.

But another term would allow her to pursue her ideas for deeper engagement in the region, to look beyond “stabilisation” and maybe pick up on opportunities for a major diplomatic exercise, as Gareth Evans did with Cambodia. The setbacks for the Burmese military and the hedging of support by China and India suggest one such possibility, perhaps by persuading Indonesia’s Prabowo to have a hard general-to-general talk with the junta’s Min Aung Hlaing.

Should Donald Trump become president again, she would be in the thick of regional efforts to save free trade, international law and alliances. For a time at least, this side of the Pacific would be like Byzantium keeping the faith after the Goths and Vandals invaded Rome and Western Europe.

On balance, as Simons found, she seems likely to be one for “staying in the room.” •

The post Staying in the room appeared first on Inside Story.

A friendly rivalry has played out between these two history lions in the halls of Oxford. Dalrymple acknowledges that his new book, The Golden Road, emerged partly from discussions and “very agreeable disagreements” with Frankopan. While he loved Frankopan’s Silk Roads he also felt India’s role “needed emphasis in counterbalance to that of Persia, Central Asia and China.”

Dalrymple’s new book, The Golden Road, sets out to highlight what he calls India’s “often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilisational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds.” It was, he insists, “one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission in early world history, fully on a par with and equal to China.”

All this has been obscured by the “seductively Sinocentric concept” of a well-traversed overland trade route linking China with Europe. Yet, he says, the idea of a Silk Road was completely unknown in ancient or medieval times: “Not a single ancient record, either Chinese or Western, refers to its existence.” The term wasn’t invented until 1877, when Prussian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (uncle of the Red Baron) was sent to plan a rail route from Berlin to Beijing.

Little was traded by land across Eurasia until the frontierless thirteenth-century Mongol empire enabled Marco Polo’s journey to the Xanadu of Kublai Khan in 1271. Chinese silk mostly came to Rome via India, and even then it was always exceeded in value by Indian spices, ivory, gems, teak and sandalwood and cotton.

“In contrast with India, China has become very good at telling the story that it was always the centre of the Asian world,” Dalrymple sniffs. Xi Jinping has vigorously pursued the notion with his trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, which involves a lot of railway-building along the old camel routes of Central Asia. “It is now clear that historians have been looking at entirely the wrong place when they thought about ancient trade routes,” Dalrymple declares. They should be looking earlier at what he calls the Indosphere, a term he borrows from historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.

As with Dalrymple’s earlier books, The Golden Road is full of adventurous tales — of East India Company soldiers stumbling into the Ajanta caves, their walls painted with Buddhist frescoes; of lonely monks like Xuanzang, who almost died of thirst before his horse scented an oasis in the Gobi. Woven into the text are some of his own travels, lushly described: the rubies adorning the court dancers in the Ajanta painting are not just blood red, but “the colour of peacock’s blood.” He makes it sound quite fun to be in a monk’s cell pouring over Sanskrit scrolls, sustained on lentil gruel, searching for the meaning, or meaningless, of life. Dalrymple doesn’t talk down to his reader, with words like fascicles, quincunx, thalassocracy, voussoirs and grimoire abounding. And the 288 pages of text are backed by a prodigious ninety-two pages of notes and a fifty-six-page bibliography.

From about 250 BCE to 1200 CE, India was “a confident exporter of its own diverse civilisation,” says Dalrymple, “creating around it an empire of ideas which developed into a tangible ‘Indosphere’ where its cultural influence was predominant.” The rest of Asia was an eager recipient of this “startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power, in religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, mythology, languages and literature.”

After emperor Ashoka (who reigned 268–232 BCE) established peace across a swathe of northern India and Afghanistan, he encouraged the adoption of the teachings of Gautama Buddha in place of early forms of Hinduism that involved a lot of animal sacrificing and other violence. Huge monasteries sprang up, as wealthy as those in Europe, among them a university at Nalanda, in present-day Bihar, that for centuries drew in monks and scholars from across the known world.

Among those scholars was a Chinese monk named Xuanzang, who evaded a ban on foreign travel and crossed the Gobi desert to reach India. When he returned sixteen years later, in 645 CE, he became adviser to the empress Wu Zetian, a former concubine who by murderous plotting had become the only woman emperor in her own right in 3000 years of Chinese history. Wu promoted Buddhism as the state religion, an antidote to paternalistic Confucianism, and ruled until 705 CE after this “esoteric Buddhist coup d’etat.”

Science, medicine and mathematics flourished. The nine numerals we know as Arabic (from the Arab caliphates that transmitted them to Europe) were first written in Bihar in the third century BCE, with the crucial zero added later. The Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata (476–550 CE) worked out the main branches of modern mathematics and anticipated some of the work of Copernicus and Galileo a thousand years later. A later Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta (c. 598–c. 668 CE), came up with positive and negative numbers.

Trade was mostly maritime, taking advantage of the fact that the monsoon winds blew one way across South and Southeast Asia at one time of the year, and back the other way at another. Camel trains took three times as long and couldn’t haul as much. Once the Romans brought Egypt under control with the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BCE, a port sprang up at the head of the Red Sea. Now, Indian goods came West, Roman gold and silver went East. The Romans grumbled at the outflow of money: Pliny the Elder called India “the sink of the world’s most precious metals.” Still, customs duties on Red Sea imports paid a third of the empire’s running costs.

When Rome’s gold supply ran short in the sixth century CE, Indian traders shifted to the east, connecting to new centres in Cambodia, Malaya, Sumatra and Java. With Brahmanical taboos on seafaring effectively abolished by Buddha’s new teachings, Buddhism burst out of India. By the sixth or seventh century CE, Southeast Asia had become a central part of the Indosphere, with ruling elites adopting Buddhist and Hindu religions and using Sanskrit in literature and politics.

The new Angkor Wat, in present-day Cambodia, was the largest Hindu temple anywhere. The ninth-century Borobudur, in Central Java, remains “the greatest and most philosophically complex Buddhist structure in the world,” Dalrymple says, and “one of the great cultural achievements of humanity.” The tenth-century Hindu temple at Prambanan, also in Central Java, contains “some of earliest and arguably greatest sets of reliefs of the Ramayana ever sculpted, more complete than anything in stone surviving in India.” These complexes were all built under regional sovereigns: there were no Indian conquests or colonies. The sculptures and monuments show local influences, the Southeast Asia craftsmen building them bigger and better than those in India itself.

Still, as Dalrymple has to admit, it all peaked quite a while ago, around the end of the seventh century CE. Even Xuanzang had found Buddhism in decline by the time he traversed the Gobi, with fewer monks in evidence and some monasteries dilapidated. The new Gupta dynasty promoted a different version of Brahmanical Hinduism, with animal sacrifices replaced by idols of deities that worshippers could address directly. Ideas of warrior kingship found in the new Purana texts were more appealing to the rulers than bloodless pacificism.

Then the raids and invasions out of the northwest started and the Indosphere “suddenly and dramatically imploded.” Over the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries Mongols and then Muslims from Turkic lands vanquished Hindu kings, sacked monasteries, and desecrated Hindu and Buddhist monuments. A wave of Persian-speaking refugees came out of Central Asia and established themselves as officials and scribes, their language replacing Sanskrit in government.

The missionaries from India into Southeast Asia were now Muslims of the Sufi mystical variety. The stamp of Indian culture nonetheless remained strong. Though they cherished Sanskrit and the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, the Southeast Asians hadn’t taken to Hindu notions of caste, purity and vegetarianism. Having recently thrown off European colonial rule, they tend to bridle at implied suggestion of having had derivative cultures.

Dalrymple doesn’t concede much to the Chinese. “Only in northern Vietnam, Korea and Japan had any of the peoples of East Asia adopted the ways, manners, architectural forms and scripts of the Chinese Middle Kingdom,” he says. Most of us would regard that as a pretty substantial cultural realm.

Dalrymple claims a lot for Indian influence, though he only mentions the possibility of Ashoka’s Buddhist missionaries in Alexandria influencing the later non-violent message of Christianity, not taking it further. It can all get exaggerated among the laymen of the Indian diaspora, he says.

No doubt there will be further ripostes in this India vs China argument. And maybe a third party will enter the field. Dalrymple tells us that a lot of the India trade was carried on very big ships from Malaya and Indonesia. As well as ranging far across the Pacific, the Austronesians sailed and traded to the western shores of the Indian Ocean, leaving their ancestral traces in places like Madagascar and Zanzibar. Maybe they had more agency than he reveals.

Amid the current debates about politics, religion and history inside India, The Golden Road may get mixed reviews from proponents of a Hindu raj who draw inspiration from their imagined past. Dalrymple paints the most glorious days as those when wise kings and holy men threw off the strictures of formal Hinduism: “History shows India always at most creative and influential when it is most connected, plural, hybrid, and receptive to new ideas from its neighbours, when it represents the cohabitation not a clash of civilisations.” It’s a brave statement: the present mood guiding India is rather more dogmatic. •

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
By William Dalrymple | Bloomsbury | $39.99 | 464 pages

The post War of the worlds appeared first on Inside Story.

Suu Kyi has been moved from her jail to a house within the compound in the capital, Naypyidaw, where the top military leaders live. But they aren’t concerned for her well-being, it seems: with armed resistance groups getting into drone warfare, her presence is designed to deter sneak attacks. The generals are hiding behind Aung San Suu Kyi.

In this, the fourth year of military rule under the innocuously named State Administration Council, the military regime has moved from overwhelmingly dominating to struggling for survival. It is faced with a diverse array of opponents. Most effective are the armies of the ethnic minorities around the fringes of Myanmar — armies that have been battling for decades against the centralising powers of the Bamar majority, from which the national military, or Tatmadaw, is largely drawn. But a broader-based resistance, drawn from supporters of the ousted government and calling themselves the People’s Defence Force, is growing in military skill and experience.

Concerted attacks last October by three ethnic armies based in the north and northwest — the “Three Brotherhood Alliance,” or 3BA — ousted the Tatmadaw from border-crossing control points into China and nearby towns. Almost weekly since then have come reports of more towns and army bases falling into rebel hands, with heavy Tatmadaw casualties and many of its troops captured or surrendered. By February, the junta had announced a new conscription drive to field more soldiers. Then, a month ago, ethnic forces took over the city of Lashio, a major stop on the old Burma Road between Mandalay, the ancient capital and Myanmar’s second-largest city, and China’s Yunnan.

David Scott Mathieson, an Australian analyst who has reported on Myanmar from Thailand for two decades, says the resistance groups are inflicting “body blows” on the Tatmadaw, forcing it out of borderlands along the country’s north, southeast and in Rakhine (Arakan) state on the Bay of Bengal. The People’s Defence Force is also starting to deliver pin pricks. In recent weeks, fighting near Mandalay forced a Singapore-owned power plant to shut down for two weeks. It also grabbed three small oil and gas fields not far from Bagan, the tourist centre of ancient temples and stupas further down the Irrawaddy River.

Mathieson cautions that some of the claims are tenuous. “You have to look at the backlash,” he tells me by phone. “When the military lose control of a town or area they then subject it to really intensive aerial and artillery bombardment. The resistance might gain control of the town but over the following weeks half the town is flattened and the townspeople have to flee.”

An accommodation has been worked out in some commercially important centres. No bombing followed the capture of Lashio, for example, which receives significant investment from China and is home to the Wa ethnic group, long known for its working relationship with China, whose United Wa Army is keeping order. Nearer the Thai border, ethnic Karen forces earlier claimed to have taken Myawaddy, a big cross-border trade centre with many Thai investments, but agreed to retreat to its fringes rather than subject it to fighting or bombing.

What has doubled the pain for the junta is that China clearly supported last year’s 3BA action against the northern border points. Its authorities were fed up with the cyber-scam centres tolerated and taxed by the regime in the borderlands, where workers — effectively captive — mount phishing attacks on individuals in China and elsewhere. It allowed the 3BA to acquire attack drones with software that enables then to avoid the anti-drone weapons China supplies the Tatmadaw. In Rakhine state, the Chinese have an understanding with the rebel Arakan Army that their gas and oil pipelines into Yunnan will not be touched.

The ethnic leaders are thinking long term, says Mathieson. “It’s going to be the Chinese who will be their major investors. It’s the curse of geography. We don’t like them but this is the hand we’ve been dealt.” On China’s part, it’s realpolitik: the Tatmadaw were out of the picture in these regions, so China would deal with the ethnic forces. Chinese diplomat Wang Yi could simultaneously go to Naypyidaw, as he did recently, and pledge support for Min Aung Hlaing and his plans to hold elections next year, a fanciful window-dressing exercise if the proven most popular electoral force, Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy, is disbarred.

“The grand picture is that the Burmese military is losing a lot of territory in the hinterlands but they do have an incredibility strong central core with military factories, airfields, and lots of bases,” says Mathieson. “The question is whether they will be able to defend that central core where the dynamics of conflict will be quite different.”

Sean Turnell views the state of play from a different angle. He is the Australian economist who was resident adviser to Suu Kyi’s government; he too was imprisoned and tried on improbable espionage charges, and he was released in November 2022 after 650 days in miserable prisons. Now at Sydney’s Lowy Institute, he has just published Best Laid Plans, a somewhat rueful account of the economic reforms his team attempted.

For Turnell, the real threat to the military regime is the dire state of the economy, which has contracted sharply since the coup and left around 40 per cent of the fifty-five million population in poverty. Production of natural gas and exports via pipeline to Thailand have fallen sharply. Foreign exchange reserves have dwindled. The State Administration Council has resorted to desperate means to shake out more hard cash and stop capital flight.

Myanmar’s rulers have also tried to get the country’s many expatriate workers to send their remittances through the official banking system, where the exchange rate is Kyat 2100 to the US dollar — as against a market rate of more than Kyat 5000 to the dollar — which effectively means confiscating 60 per cent of their earnings. A somewhat less punitive exchange rate is enforced on commodity exporters. To cut off alternative ways of moving funds, security authorities have arrested leading bankers including the Yoma group’s Serge Pun, along with gold dealers and operators of the hundi system of counter-party payments that has run for centuries across India and the Middle East. (The regime uses hundi too, to evade sanctions.) Even the regime-appointed central bank governor has been hauled in.

“They [the State Administration Council] have given up any rhetoric on development or growth,” Turnell tells me. “All of their policy is about: How do we get resources to survive? And above all that means foreign exchange. Because the blending of the two, the economy and the military, comes at that point. They need the foreign exchange to buy the weaponry, from China or Russia. They’re desperately short of it.”

Foreign exchange reserves have fallen to “probably around a quarter” of pre-coup levels, said Turnell. “This is why they keep bringing in those measures — to capture the remittance business, go after the hundi dealers, the goldsmiths, the banks, the attack on Serge Pun and the bankers, all brought up to Naypyidaw and given lectures. It’s all about the same thing: commandeering foreign exchange… There’s no doubt they are on the back foot.”

This drift has Turnell and exiled figures in the self-styled National Unity Government starting to think about how they would resume the reforms so abruptly ended by the army. “We would do it all again, only faster and deeper,” Turnell writes in his book.

But economic reformers could no longer leave two previous constitutional givens in place. One is the military’s lock-hold on the defence and home ministries and its own budget. The other is the centralised state structure, with endless negotiations on devolution stretched into a future where it was hoped greater prosperity and cleaner governance would weaken ethnic demands for autonomy or independence.

Aside from military retreat, could a new central government really concede a dispersal of powers? The support Suu Kyi gave the Tatmadaw against charges of genocide against Rohingya in Rakhine comes to mind, along with the strident support for Bamar dominance among populist Buddhist monks and their wealthy abbots.

“That’s the $64 question,” said Turnell. “From the National Unity Government’s side, they’ve been incredibly careful to craft everything in some sort of federal framework, and to convince ethnic groups that there will be a sort of federal system. Certainly some of the armed organisations have at the very least paid lip-service to that. Where groups like the 3BA, the United Wa Army, fit into all that is where it becomes more difficult. Some of their activities would not bear close observation in terms of national building and all the rest of it.”

How would Suu Kyi herself now see these questions? Communications are now nearly non-existent, Turnell said. When he was appearing with her in their trials, they had some exchanges. “We would hear things, that she was highly favourable to what the National Unity Government was all about, things like federalism,” he said. “I don’t think she was in any sense dictating the pace of that, but certainly not objecting to it.”

If she had, she would have told him, Turnell thinks. “My leaving of her was a specific moment where a message could be got across, and the only message she was absolutely full on about getting across was how proud she was with the resistance, that people were standing up, that this was a new generation, things were different. There was no sense of her objecting to any particular piece of policy, even though that policy was in some ways quite different to what she was doing, in particular over the Rakhine, over federalism.”

In jail, Turnell and other key reformers talked about what they would do differently. “The assumption of these people, and it might be her assumption, was that the military had no place. Which meant that a lot of things that were unacceptable to them could go ahead, like a federal structure, like a very different approach to Rakhine.”

The military will resist all the way, of course. “Taking my economist hat off but putting my economic historian hat on, one of the things that always happens is when regimes get really desperate, in the crunch you don’t need money any more, you just take,” Turnell says.

“Money is always an ephemeral, inter-subjective reality, a philosophical thing, a belief we both trust,” he said. “Once that breaks down and money ceases to have a value, then you are in the world of nature, jungle and might, and real resources. A regime like Myanmar’s — they print money, the taxation system is not up to anything, the bond market is collapsed. They can go after the banks, the foreign exchange, because that retains value because it’s determined by somebody else.”

As monetary value collapses, regimes employ naked power, seizure and command. “To me, the regime is not yet into that last desperate stage, but it does seem they are getting into it, where the monetary system is beginning to not meet their needs.”

The decline could be slowed, perhaps, by an internal military coup. Turnell is surprised that none of the regime’s crony capitalist friends — figures like the notorious Tay Za and Aung Ko Win — seem to have remonstrated with the leadership. “But you might get rid of one despotic but incompetent general, and you get one that’s no less despotic but more competent.”

Where Mathieson and Turnell converge, however, is that after all the borderland reverses and the collapse of the formal economy, the regime might stretch out its survival in the central core, feeding off its exchange rate extortion, bartering resources, and paying for Russian and Chinese arms in gold.

“When you add up all these different data points: the currency, fuel prices, commodity prices, battlefield losses, it looks pretty grim for the State Administration Council,” Mathieson said. “The big question here is: They’ve stuck it out for nearly four years and how much longer can they hold on? I suspect that as long as they have access to their domestic arms manufacturers, enough bodies to put uniforms on and to fight, and air power, they can probably hold on. Ten years they could easily hold on. They can go down fighting, or they can hold on to be lords of the wasteland, like in Mad Max: Fury Road.” •

The post Lords of the wasteland appeared first on Inside Story.

Tactical voting among Macron’s centre-right Ensemble party and the New Popular Front, or NFP, a leftist alliance, managed to relegate Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally to third place in the second round. But now comes the challenge of forming a government incorporating the high-tax, big-welfare NFP and Ensemble’s fiscal conservatives.

As the biggest grouping, with 182 seats to Ensemble’s 168 in the 577-member parliament, the NFP would normally be invited first to form a government by Macron. But the leader of its largest component, France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is regarded as too red-hot to touch by the president and his party.

Expecting Mélenchon to work with Macron and Ensemble would seem beyond the limits of the “cohabitation” that has previously functioned, albeit uneasily, when the French presidency and the legislature have been held by opposing parties. More moderate figures on the left — Olivier Faure of the Socialists and Marine Tondelier of the Greens — are being talked about as potential PMs, but the seventy-four-year-old Mélenchon, like some other elderly politicians around the world, is refusing to withdraw.

As well as facing many of the problems confronting other advanced economies, the new French government will also have to deal with a crisis on the far side of the world — in New Caledonia, that tiny splinter of Gondwanaland annexed by Paris in 1853 and subjected to the kind of colonial regime pioneered sixty-five years earlier by the British in New South Wales.

The original New Caledonians — Melanesians who came to the Pacific in the great Austronesian canoe migrations between 3000 and 4000 years ago — were nearly wiped out by colonial diseases and massacres. Population numbers rebounded last century, and from the 1970s the local people reasserted their heritage and claims for self-determination under the guidance of a Catholic priest-turned-politician named Jean-Marie Tjibaou.

It was Tjibaou who gave the territory’s tribes a collective name, the Kanak, in ironic tribute to a traditional spirit and the once-pejorative name “Kanaka” given to the Melanesian indentured labourers on sugar cane plantations in Queensland. The Kanak make up about 42 per cent of New Caledonia’s 270,000 people, Europeans another 24 per cent, and the rest of the population identifies with Polynesian and Asian settler communities or claims no ethnic allegiance.

The Kanak awakening of the 1980s led to a near civil war, with Kanaks seizing outlying farms and blockading roads and French-loyalist vigilantes hitting back with murderous ambushes. Tjibaou agreed to put aside independence demands during a long peace-building process but was himself assassinated the next year by a Kanak riled at his compromise.

After nearly two decades of conflict, Kanak and loyalist parties agreed in 1998 on a new twenty-year accord to advance the Kanaks, build a common identity and include Kanak representatives in the territory government. Three referendums on independence would then follow. The first two votes went against independence, but by a narrowing margin. When Macron announced the third in 2021, the Kanaks objected that they were still deep in mourning for numerous victims of Covid and boycotted the vote.

A sweeping majority of those who did vote opposed independence. Macron described it as the final, decisive outcome; the Kanaks thought otherwise.

Macron further raised the temperature in May this year by putting forward legislation to widen the local franchise to anyone resident in the territory for ten years or more, a change Kanaks feared would tip the electoral scales even further against them. When it was approved in Paris by both the National Assembly and the Senate — preparatory to a joint sitting to give it constitutional force — New Caledonia erupted into a new civil war.

Guarded now by 3500 soldiers and police, the territory has returned to a precarious calm interrupted by sporadic arson attacks and blockades. But nine people have died since May, 2343 people have been arrested and a night-time curfew remains. About 700 businesses have been destroyed by arson and looting, according to the Industries Federation of New Caledonia, with total damage put at A$3.55 billion. The nickel-refining industry, like Australia’s, has succumbed to Indonesian competition and tourists are unlikely to return any time soon, leaving the territory’s economy in tatters.

Although Macron’s ministers have called for calm and dialogue, their actions have further inflamed Kanak anger. French authorities arrested five young members of a committee organising protests against the voting changes, charged them with criminal incitement and flew them to France the same day, where they are locked up in widely dispersed jails. The overtones of the nineteenth-century colonial practice of political exile were noted.

Mélenchon, for one, was not impressed. “One hundred and seventy years of relentlessness were not enough to defeat the Kanak will to once again become sovereign over their destiny and no one will ever succeed,” he said when the conflict broke out in May. “There is no way out of a colonial situation than decolonisation, and everything else is a waste of time.” Many of his NFP colleagues would agree.Not only has France’s election result added weight to the decolonisation case, it has also brought another surprise. New Caledonia has two seats in the National Assembly in Paris. One seat, covering the rural areas of the Grande Terre, New Caledonia’s main island, was won by Emmanuel Tjibaou, a son of the assassinated Jean-Marie Tjibaou. As the National Assembly’s first pro-independence member for thirty-eight years and a recognised expert in France on Oceanic cultures, Tjibaou will be a powerful voice for Kanak nationhood. His election overcame a cunning measure taken in 1988 to keep Kanaks out of parliament by adding settler-majority suburbs of Nouméa to the mainly rural island.

The other seat, covering urban Nouméa and the outlying Loyalty Islands, predictably went to a loyalist, Nicolas Metzdorf. But this electorate, weighted to the loyalist camp by the large population of French and other settlers in Nouméa, produced its own surprise. The losing candidate, Omayra Naisseline, the pro-independence daughter-in-law of a renowned independence fighter, won a sizable 48 per cent of the vote. Combined, Tjibaou and Naisseline won 53 per cent of the 156,000 valid votes cast across New Caledonia. And this was from electoral rolls open to all French citizens, unlike the local assembly and referendum rolls restricted to long-term residents under the 1998 agreement. As a former Australian consul-general in Nouméa, Denise Fisher, wrote in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, “These are sobering results for loyalists,”

The question of New Caledonia’s future was not posed directly on the ballot papers. But the result indicates a widening acceptance of independence, or at least of its inevitability in some form. This shift probably originates among members of three groups: Polynesians from the French-held islands scattered to the east who are drawn to a movement called Éveil Océanien (Oceanic Awakening); the roughly 7.5 per cent of the population, thought to mostly be whites, who simply call themselves “Caledonian”; and the “Métros,” younger French working in New Caledonia for a few years to enjoy the Pacific and save their lavish allowances for a place back home. For the Métros, the long-established loyalists are relics of a 1950s France riven by resistance to Algerian independence.

The result opens the possibility that a franchise even wider than Macron’s proposed ten-year residency might actually favour independence, though this would be a big gamble for the Kanak parties. Even without those extra voters, though, the combination of a French left sharing government in Paris, a Kanak voice in the National Assembly and an overall majority for pro-independence candidates in New Caledonia itself has shifted the ground, as has emigration of non-Kanaks spurred by the latest turmoil.

Desperate political battlelines are being drawn by the loyalists in Nouméa. As Nic Maclellan reported recently in Inside Story, one of their most fervent leaders, Sonia Backès, a one-time junior minister under Macron, has called for the territory to be partitioned between the affluent, white-dominated region around Nouméa and the Kanak north of the Grande Terre and Loyalty Islands.

“The Nouméa Accord [of 1998] wanted to impose a fusion or an assimilation. It has only generated an implosion,” Backès said on Bastille Day. “This common destiny has failed… [and] the project of an institutionally united New Caledonia, based on a living together, one with the other, is over and done with.”

Partition has long been part of the French playbook. In the 1970s, the loyalist island of Mayotte was excluded from the newly independent Comoro islands in the Indian Ocean. In the same era, French agencies supported nativist movements on Espiritu Santo and Tanna islands in the Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebrides in their attempts to secede from the emerging state of Vanuatu.

As the implications of the French elections sink in, concern has continued to mount in the region. The Melanesian Spearhead Group — Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea — has proposed a joint mission to New Caledonia with the United Nations, while the wider Pacific Islands Forum, which includes Australia and New Zealand, has just decided to send three of its leaders — Fiji’s Sitiveni Rambuka, Cook Islands’ Mark Brown and Solomon Islands’ Jeremiah Menele — to Nouméa ahead of its annual summit in Tonga on 26 August.

Macron, playing the China card, says a French exit would see Nouméa instantly become a Chinese base. But other independent Pacific states have played off the Chinese against traditional friends without falling into that trap, and Kanak leaders say they would be happy for France to retain defence responsibility.

While China is unlikely to back other separatist movements in West Papua and Bougainville given its own secession concerns, it could happily support decolonisation in the French territories and win acclaim in the region. The United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan would be conceding an own-goal to Beijing by backing Macron against any form of independence. •

The post And now what do we do? appeared first on Inside Story.

They lauded Kevin Rudd’s opening up of Australia’s Washington embassy for a launch of Scott Morrison’s folksy book about his intertwined Pentecostal and political beliefs as a deft diplomatic overture to the Trump camp. Indeed Morrison, after quitting parliament, has joined Trump’s former CIA chief and secretary of state Mike Pompeo in a defence-oriented consultancy. If Trump is elected, he would be pushing Australia’s interests with gusto and no doubt taking a cut.

Former senior defence official Allan Behm is not so sure the future will be anything like normal. “With or without the re-election of Donald Trump, America is already in crisis: a crisis of confidence, a crisis of democracy, a crisis of equality, a crisis of leadership,” he writes in The Odd Couple, his fine new study of the US–Australia relationship. “Even if America is not on a path to self-destruction, it is certainly moving towards self-absorbed irrelevancy.”

Behm believes that Australia’s greatest strategic risk is “the political and social collapse of the United States of America. America’s strategic collapse would follow.” It is a grave challenge for Canberra: “To sit idly by, worrying interminably and pointlessly about the threat from China when the threat of America’s political and social collapse is infinitely more serious, would be a tragedy from which Australia would find it difficult to recover. For neither America nor Australia is helplessness an option.”

Behm is son of a cold war–era deputy chief of ASIO and a former head of strategy and international policy in the defence department. In the latter role he was privy to the deepest secrets of the US alliance, including negotiations over access to the intelligence flow through the Pine Gap satellite base. He was adviser to Penny Wong in opposition and now runs the international arm of the Australia Institute, Canberra’s least compromised think-tank.

Coming from a figure so immersed in the American relationship and Australia’s strategic thinking, a warning like this has to be taken very seriously. The Odd Couple is no diatribe: in a relatively concise book, Behm shows an immense and affectionate knowledge of both Australian and American history — and an appreciation of a relationship far wider than the ANZUS pact’s supposed “insurance policy,” to which our governments keep paying premiums.

His feared US breakdown would come from divisions among Americans: toxic racism; class divides among Blacks; tensions between ex-Cubans and ex-Mexicans among the Latinos and between north and south among the Whites; “structural misogyny”; the gutting of blue-collar America by the neoconservatism and globalism of Reagan and Clinton; post-truth new media; and a Republican Party captured by conspiracy theorists.

Has America been here before? Well, yes. Behm reaches back to the 1972 US election campaign and its acerbic chronicler, journalist Hunter S. Thompson. As he wrote in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72:

This might be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that [Democratic candidate] George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talks about “new politics” and “honesty in government,” is one of the few men who’ve run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

America did recover from that episode. But in our era, if they haven’t succumbed to oxycodone or fentanyl, alienated White males are responding to Trump’s call to “take back control” and “make America great again.” Political discourse has become so coarsened that threats of violence are commonplace. A survey in 2022 found one in three Americans believing violence against the government can sometimes be justified. “There are emerging signs that America’s democracy is being devoured from within,” Behm says.

What can be done by America’s friends? Behm is scathing about the timidity of Australian diplomacy. For a country that boasts about “punching above our weight” Australia usually hides in the crowd, content to play it safe in the “Western European and Others” group at the United Nations. It talks of “shared values” with countries as diverse as the United States, India and Japan, and has “comprehensive” or “enhanced” strategic partnerships with a scattering of countries including Indonesia, China, and France. The values are never defined, and in a crunch they are always traded away to protect “interests.”

“The mantra of most Australian foreign ministers, and the standard by which they measure themselves, is the claim that they ‘deal with the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be,’” Behm observes wearily. “So what is the point?” The result is a foreign policy without ambition, he says, a foreign minister lacking energy and imagination, investing in the status quo, without attempting to contribute to change.

The remedy he urges is to move beyond “Panglossian” references to the alliance, beyond the constant invocations of the “international rules-based order,” beyond trusting in the condescending US attendance at annual foreign and defence minister talks, and beyond faith in John Howard’s free-trade agreement (“the Americans could see the antipodean hayseeds coming, and gulled them for all they were worth”). Spend more on diplomacy (currently a fraction of the hundreds of billions committed to nuclear submarines). Wrest control of the relationship away from the defence–industrial complex. Shift attention to the broader cultural, educational and economic ties (both America and Australia have a trillion dollars Australian invested in each other, and Australia’s super funds are only getting started in the US). Advise against military follies instead of going along for the ride. Invest in a US lobbying operation, like those of Israel and Taiwan, working on Congress and key states.

Despite the book’s title, Behm considers the two countries very alike and compatible, and thus able to hold this kind of discourse. He could have added that Canberra might find a Japanese partner in America-whispering, as Malcolm Turnbull did with Shinzo Abe during the Trump presidency.

He sees Australia, after eighty years of dependency, clinging to America. “On whom would Australia depend… if it could not depend on America?” he asks. “Without America, Australia would be alone, adrift on its continent in a region that it does not understand and with which it has no affinity.” It could then revert into fearful isolationism or be thrust into constructing its own community, under different rules from Pax Americana.

Behm doesn’t pursue this latter line of thought, which would be interesting as he is an Indonesianist too. But after twelve years of Xi Jinping and ten years of Narendra Modi, and with Prabowo Subianto’s imminent ascension in Indonesia, perhaps too many elements of uncertainty have been added to the Keatingesque idea of “security in the region” rather than from the region.

For journalist Andrew Fowler, writing in his new book Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty, Australia is already locked in a dangerous vassaldom thanks to a succession of agreements that allow the United States unilateral use of Australian territory — from the surveillance base at Pine Gap, the US Marine “rotation” through Darwin and the expanded Tindal air base for B-52 bombers — for war operations. The final instrument of servitude, he argues, is the AUKUS defence agreement that Scott Morrison sprung on the Labor opposition and the public in September 2021.

The merits of the plan for the Australian navy to acquire nuclear-powered submarines are still debated, with strong arguments against it mounted by academic Hugh White (like Behm a former head of defence strategic policy) and the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen. Doubts remain about whether the US navy can ramp up its submarine program to spare the initial three, four or five Virginia-class boats, whether Britain can design the follow-on AUKUS submarine, and whether Adelaide’s shipyard is capable of building it. The plan is nevertheless steaming ahead, with the navy dispatching sailors to the US for nuclear training.

Nuked is most revealing in its tracking of the decision to abandon the conventional French-designed Barracuda Shortfin submarine. That option was adopted in 2016 by Turnbull’s government after a competitive tender in which the French vied against a German proposal and the existing Japanese Soryu-class. For France’s president at the time, Francois Hollande, it was a $50 billion coup, the biggest defence deal his country had ever landed.

“Neither Turnbull nor Hollande could have understood at the time that powerful forces were already working assiduously against them — risking everything, including Australia’s national security — to undo the deal from the moment it was signed,” Fowler says. Figures in high office, including intelligence agencies, didn’t want Australia to move closer to France and away from traditional allies Britain and the United States. The challenge of adapting the Barracuda Shortfin, designed as a nuclear-powered boat, and wrangles over building the submarines in Adelaide fed media leaks suggesting the deal was in deep trouble. With Morrison’s toppling of Turnbull in 2018, these anti-French conspirators were in a position to strike.

Fowler sees a key agent on the Australian side as former diplomat Andrew Shearer, who had been an adviser to prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, was exiled for a time to Washington’s hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, and returned to Canberra as, successively, deputy chief of the Office of National Intelligence, Morrison’s cabinet secretary and head of the ONI (where he remains, extended by Anthony Albanese in 2022).

If the navy had decided on Japan’s Soryu boat, might Shearer and counterparts like the CSIS Japan expert Michael Green (now heading the US Studies Centre at Sydney University) have let it ride? When Abbott was prime minister, Shearer would have written the rather sentimental speech he delivered about elements of “chivalry” in the Pacific War; overtures like that made prime minister Shinzo Abe think the Soryu would be the choice.

Exactly who decided that Australia needed nuclear-powered submarines, and why, is still unexplained in Nuked. Neither Morrison nor Albanese has given any formal statement about the deal to the Australian parliament or public. Only Labor backbencher Luke Gosling, a former army officer, has tried to fill the gap in a recent Lowy Institute paper, arguing it gives “deterrent” power by being able to strike at very long range.

Fowler did talk to Turnbull, but doesn’t seem to have got to the main players after he lost office, including Morrison, Shearer, the key navy officers or defence secretary Greg Moriarty. As the author of a sympathetic book on Julian Assange and a journalist with Four Corners, he would probably have evoked mistrust in these quarters.

But James Curran, a Sydney University historian and international editor of the Australian Financial Review, did gain access to a fuller cast of characters for his substantial two-part exploration of AUKUS earlier this week. Using extensive information from Morrison, it takes us beyond Fowler’s account.

In brief, Curran shows the Australian navy had considered acquiring nuclear-powered submarines in the past but was always rebuffed by the Americans, who hold the technology close to their chests. In 2020, with the French deal encountering problems, Morrison revived the idea. Until Joe Biden took office it was going to be a British–Australian project, even though US would need to approve access to the engine design used in British submarines.

Biden’s officials came in with the idea of transferring US submarines to the Australian navy while it was waiting for the British-Australian boats to be built. It was touch and go for Morrison until Biden gave approval at a meeting on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Cornwall in June 1921; then followed three months of keeping the French as a fall-back, which involved deceiving president Emmanuel Macron and keeping Anthony Albanese in the dark. The possibility of a delicious “wedge” if Labor had refused to go along was a bonus.

This timeline fits with Fowler’s identification of Kurt Campbell, a senior Biden national security official, as the driver on the American side. Earlier in his career, Campbell had masterminded Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” of which the Darwin marine rotation is a feature. Campbell had long been working to get Australia off the fence when it comes to China, and now clearly thinks he has succeeded. In testimony to sceptical US congress members about the transfer of the Virginia-class boats, he declared: “When submarines are provided from the United States to Australia, it’s not like they’re lost.”

Has AUKUS driven the final nail in Australia’s independence? It could be argued it’s only a step further down a longstanding track of “interoperability” with the American military. According to defence commentator Brian Toohey, our F-35 fighters — declared an asset of “sovereign power” by Morrison — can only be fully serviced by hooking up to a computer in the United States; unlike its Israeli counterpart, our air force hasn’t been given the source code for the software. If that’s wrong, I haven’t seen a denial. Our forces need US satellites to function.

But it would be hard to refuse to send Australian Virginia-class submarines — the subs the Americans have pledged to sell us — if a conflict blew up with China. Already the navy’s submariner talent is being drawn off for training and assignment on US nuclear submarines, possibly at the cost of finding crews for its existing Collins-class conventional boats. Pulling out those submariners, as Malcolm Fraser did with Australians assigned to British ships in the Falklands war, would be difficult if war did break out. Meanwhile, harking back to the imperial days of the Royal Navy’s Sydney-based Australia squadron, British and American nuclear submarines will soon be operating from the naval base near Perth.

As Curran shows us, a group of retired admirals and submarine experts concur with Fowler. Identifying many potential tripping-up points, they argue that AUKUS could well fail and leave us with no submarines of our own and reliant on the Americans and the British by the mid 2030s. That would indeed be a loss of sovereignty. The group has presented a Plan B for a derivative of the Virginia-class subs to be built entirely in Adelaide, but its analysis has so far fallen on deaf ears in Canberra, where the Albanese government still fears Morrison’s wedge.

Other questions niggle. If the range and speed of a nuclear-powered submarine was suddenly seen as essential, why did the navy not explore the original nuclear version of the French submarine? Although the conventional version was far ahead of its rivals in meeting the tender terms, Fowler reveals Turnbull had written into the contract an option to switch to nuclear power down the production line. The low-enriched uranium power plant on the French subs has fewer non-proliferation and other issues than the bomb-grade high-enriched uranium used in US and British boats. It is smaller, better suited to the shallow waters of Australia’s northern approaches, and requires less than half the crew of the Virginia-class or the projected joint design with Britain. Either version would have accommodated US weapons and combat systems.

Earlier this year the French president Emmanuel Macron offered to help the Brazilian navy develop a nuclear submarine. It may get one before we do. •

The Odd Couple: The Australia–America Relationship
By Allan Behm | Upswell | $29.99 | 264 pages

Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty
By Andrew Fowler | Melbourne University Press | $34.99 | 198 pages

The post Fear and loathing in the American alliance appeared first on Inside Story.

Interest in its past is even less evident. Yet every now and then comes a historian who is such a vivid story-teller that a publisher is willing to test the market with a long book about a decades-ago, far-off time. Think of John Dower’s Embracing Defeat (on the allied occupation of Japan) or Tim Harper’s Underground Asia (on the early plotters against Western powers). David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian scholar who writes in Dutch, places himself in that league with Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, his new account of the last days of the Netherlands East Indies and the Indonesian struggle for independence.

Translated by David Colmer and David McKay, Revolusi brings to vivid life a half century that has slipped from memory, though not before Van Reybrouck was able to interview many of the surviving participants. Blended with written records, it is an enthralling read. If you thought you’d read everything important about the emergence of Indonesia, think again.

The book has already caused a shock in the Netherlands. Despite earlier revelations about the atrocities its force wrought during its four-year effort to suppress independence after the second world War, 50 per cent of the Dutch were still proud of their colonial empire, according to a 2019 survey, as opposed to 32 per cent of the British, 26 per cent of the French, and 23 per cent of the Belgians.

Although the Dutch believed their Indies empire stretched back 350 years to their first spice traders, Van Reybrouck points out that full territorial control was reached only in 1914 when the colonial army, the KNIL, subjugated Aceh after a decades-long campaign. The colonial heyday lasted just twenty-eight years before the Dutch administration surrendered to the Japanese attack.

Van Reybrouck opens his book with a vivid image. A modern passenger liner is steaming across a calm Java Sea. On the upper deck are Europeans and a few rich Asians in comfortable cabins. A deck below are more artisanal passengers of various races bunking in shared cabins. On the open decks below them, huddled against the weather, are camped the uncounted “native” passengers. A crewman has left a porthole near the waterline open, and a tilt becomes a capsize. This is an actual maritime disaster, that of the Van der Wyck in 1936.

Although the Dutch government had replaced its exploitative “cultivation” system (which obliged the subject people to grow cash crops for export) with an “ethical policy” promising educational and other development, the class division aboard the Van der Wyck reflected on-the-ground reality. Some subjects could rise from Deck 3 to Deck 2, but only a very few could make it to Deck 1, and not all of them wanted to be brown-skinned Dutchmen.

Some potential Deck 1 passengers met in the late 1910s in a house down an alleyway in Surabaya where a cultured Javanese aristocrat named Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto, president of the nascent nationalist movement called Sarekat Islam, had opened a boarding school in 1914. Among the students later in that decade was a boy of mixed Javanese and Balinese parentage called Sukarno, who studied there for five years; among the visitors were Munawar Musso and others, who formed the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, in 1922, and young Islamists including Soekarmadji Maridjan Kartosuwirjo. The three great strands of Indonesia’s resistance and early politics — the nationalism, religion and communism plaited together by Sukarno — were forming under this roof.

The more savvy among the governors-general of the Netherlands East Indies tried to bring this aspiration into the colonial discourse. One formed an advisory People’s Council in 1916. Another expanded it in 1930. But nationalism was already out of the stable, and so was communism. The PKI staged an uprising in 1926–27, against Stalin’s advice, that was squashed brutally. The Dutch sent 800 of those they didn’t kill to Boven Digul, three days’ journey upriver from Merauke in the malarial jungle of West Papua. The few who escaped to Thursday Island were sent back by Australian authorities.

Nationalists who might have qualified for Deck 1 were also suppressed. Sukarno, who had studied architecture in Bandung and formed the Indonesian Nationalist Party, was jailed in 1930. Released after two years, he was exiled in remote Flores the following year after a naval mutiny alarmed the Dutch. Around the same time two future independence leaders, Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, newly returned from Leiden University, were interned at Boven-Digoel.

Most political parties were banned, newspapers and communications subjected to censorship, and intelligence services given extra resources. The hardline governor-general, Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge, was turning the country into a police state.

The Europeans on Deck 1 lived above it all. The arrival of increasing number of Dutch women (four for every five males by 1920) was helping keep the men away from inter-Deck relationships of the kind that had produced a large mixed-race group known as Indos. In their clubs, bungalows and golf courses, the Europeans read reports of Hitler’s rise with enthusiasm. When the Dutch Nazi party leader toured in 1935, he was greeted by outstretched right arms and entertained twice by De Jonge. The local Nazi party had three times as many members as the Dutch one.

Then came Japan’s invasion. Japanese spies masquerading as benevolent traders had been effective in cultivating Indonesians, but attitudes towards the invaders began changing as they became increasingly harsh. Men were sent off as labourers to Siam and elsewhere, not many to return. Young women were forced into concubinage or prostitution. Four million died of starvation on Java alone during 1944.

Sukarno had gone along with the Japanese to test their promise of liberation. After they surrendered in August 1945 they helped him and Hatta broadcast a declaration of independence, the first in any European colony. Then came an uneasy interregnum. Sukarno, Hatta and Sjahrir trod warily, trying to strike a balance between the outgoing Japanese and the powerful incoming Allies (who included exiled Dutch forces in Australia and the liberated Netherlands) on the one hand, and their impatient population on the other.

Most impatient of all were the pemuda — roughly two million young people aged fifteen to twenty-five — who had been trained and indoctrinated by Japanese militias to believe that semangat (spirit) conquered all. “The pemuda had seen their mothers starve to death, their fathers dragged off as forced labourers, their sisters abducted as comfort women,” writes Van Reybrouck. They were “wiry scrags who had been drilled endlessly to rush the enemy with nothing more than bamboo spears, sticks and fake guns, screaming loudly… Wide-open eyes, wild gaze, sacred fury.”

A nightmare awaited the British forces as they began arriving in Java and Sumatra in September 1945. (The Australian army had an easier time in the east of the archipelago, thanks to the prevailing loyalty there to the Dutch.) The pemuda, who had launched an orgy of killing against any Europeans and Indos they encountered, regarded the British as a Trojan Horse for the Dutch. They ransacked the Japanese armouries, handing out tens of thousands of guns.

In October, pemuda surrounded British brigadier Aubertin Mallaby in a Surabaya street and hacked him to death. Allied Southeast Asia commander Louis Mountbatten responded by sending 12,000 Indian troops and twenty-four tanks, aided by shelling from the sea and bombing by Lancasters out of Singapore. Some 15,000 Indonesians died.

By the time the British pulled out in November 1946 the Dutch were back. First came civilians and remnants of the colonial military from their exile in Australia, then members of the new Royal Dutch Army made up of 120,000 young men conscripted between 1946 and 1949. (About 6000 refused to embark, of whom 2565 were jailed, and the hunt for deserters went on until 1958.)

While Dutch forces built up in the Indies, top civilians pursued a parallel track by talking to Sukarno, keeping the Americans happy, and floating a plan for the Republic of Indonesia in Java and Sumatra to be incorporated into a wider federation with states in Borneo and eastern islands, all under the Dutch crown. Sukarno’s republicans accepted it as the best offer going.

But this modified scheme for clinging on went too far for conservatives back in Amsterdam. They unilaterally added a new condition: New Guinea had to be kept separate so that the Dutch and Indo populations of the Indies could be resettled there. As Van Reybrouck comments, “The coasts of New Guinea, modernised since the American invasion, would offer a new luxury deck, now that the passengers from Decks 2 and 3 had climbed to the top in the rest of the archipelago.”

Despite the agreement, clashes continued on the borders of the Dutch and Republican zones. After the pemuda infiltrated some of the outer islands, commando captain Raymond “Turk” Westerling was sent to Makassar with 120 men to restore order by any means. His field trials and mass executions claimed the lives of hundreds of villagers. Back in Central Java, the Dutch imposed a naval and air blockade on Republican strongholds around the city of Yogyakarta.

By now, the Netherlands treasury was nearly bankrupt. But military hardliners argued a quick strike would gain control of plantations, which would then return a profit on exportable commodities. With the Dutch formally abandoning the peace agreement, quick advances in a “police action” by some 100,000 troops did indeed give the Dutch control of most of West and East Java, Semarang, North Sumatra around Medan, and the oilfields around Palembang.

But then what? Dutch army commander Simon Spoor, who wanted to go on to Yogyakarta, was backed by the ruling Catholic party and Queen Wilhelmina, who urged a clearing out of the “Yogya hotbed” and its “extremists.” The Socialists, though, who were also in the governing coalition, wanted the Republic to survive; otherwise their rank and file would revolt.

Rather than pushing out the “extremists” the collapse of the peace agreement obliged the most reasonable Republican negotiator, Sukarno’s prime minister Sutan Sjahrir, to resign. And responding to the police action, the dismayed American and British governments offered their good offices, and Australia (now favouring decolonisation) and India put Indonesia on the agenda of the UN Security Council, which issued a ceasefire call. The police action was wound up after fifteen days, but not before it had won control of all the assets the Dutch wanted.

The UN had meanwhile appointed a committee of good offices to mediate in the dispute. The Dutch nominated fellow colonialist Belgium, the Indonesians Australia (which appointed industrial court judge Richard Kirby, “an expert on social issues with a decidely progressive profile,” says Van Reybrouck) and those two chose the United States as the third. When the three representatives arrived in Jakarta in October 1947, the conflict was immediately internationalised.

A US warship, the Renville, anchored out of territorial waters was ostensibly neutral deck space for a further round of peace talks at the end of 1947. The Americans leant on the Republicans to accept a new version of the Dutch scheme: the Dutch could kept the territory just seized and they could form new states elsewhere, all including the shrunken Indonesian republic going into a United States of Indonesia under the Dutch queen.

That this plan had to be validated by referendums gave the Republicans some way out in future.  Even so, Sukarno’s braiding of the three political strands, nationalism, religion and communism, came apart. Kartosuwirjo, the Islamist who’d visited the old school in Surabaya, began an uprising in West Java to make Indonesia a Darul Islam (House of Islam); the unrest went on until he was captured and executed in 1962. Socialist prime minister Amir Sjarifuddin resigned and joined up with the communist PKI, under Musso (another old visitor in Surabaya), who had just returned from Moscow.

When the communists took control of Madiun, a town in Republican territory, in September 1948 — hoisting a red hammer-and-sickle flag in place of the Republic’s red and white — Sukarno and Hatta sent in their army’s Siliwangi division. During months of fighting the Republican army arrested 35,000 PKI followers and summarily executed Musso, Sjarifuddin and hundreds of others.

This display of anti-communism swung the Americans away from the Dutch and towards Sukarno and Hatta. Early in December 1948 they warned the Dutch that any further military action would affect Marshall Plan aid. Even so, on 19 December a hardline new colonial administrator, Louis Beel, ordered a second police action. Planes strafed Yogyakarta’s airport and paratroops landed to seize it. Motorised columns pushed south from Semarang. In Sumatra, other columns opened corridors across the island. In Yogyakarta, Sukarno and Hatta let themselves be captured while their army dispersed to the jungles and countryside.

Again, though, what now for the Dutch? They had assumed the UN Security Council was packed up for the year and would return in late January to a fait accompli. But Australia, supported by the United States, urged an emergency session, which on 24 December called for a ceasefire and the release of the nationalist leaders, and later set out a timetable for transfer of sovereignty by July 1950.

Beel tried to pre-empt the UN in April by announcing a “United States of Indonesia.” But the leaders of the previously compliant outer island states switched to the Republicans. Though the Netherlands was now discredited, fighting went on until August 1949; indeed, this was the most vicious phase of the four-year war, with 1200 Dutch soldiers and an estimated 47,000 Indonesians killed.

In retirement homes in Europe and Indonesia, and even in remote Nepali villages where veterans of the British forces were living, Van Reybrouck collected personal accounts of the war crimes committed during this brutal conflict. Ex-soldier Goos Blok talked of field interrogations, of a fifteen-year-old rigged up to a field telephone to receive electric shocks, of water torture and civilians shot in panic. Radio operator Stef Horvath, who couldn’t hear signals because they were drowned out by the screams of suspects being interrogated next door, saw prisoners dead of dehydration and suffocation in sealed railway wagons.

Others admitted wild, whimsical shootings, kampongs sprayed with machine guns from a distance, villages burnt and all males over fourteen shot dead. After interrogators gave up, prisoners would be told “Go piss in the kali (canal),” only to be shot and then reported as trying to escape. Rapes were frequent but only thirteen soldiers were convicted for sexual assault, receiving sentences of at most eighteen months.

The pemuda were vicious too, provoking savage reprisals that only made the Dutch more hated. Former soldier Ton Berlee, who’d survived the Japanese invasion and then the Burma railway, had the job of photographing the bodies of comrades and attending autopsies: “Tongue out, eyes out, scalped, privates off. I had to photograph it. If you’d seen your mates so terribly mutilated, tortured and killed, you shot at everything that moved. And then we’re the war criminals! Agreed, our side did things that weren’t right either, but you just went mad.”

Beyond the “excesses” of enraged individual soldiers in the field, Van Reybrouck sees systematic war crimes. On 9 December 1947 Dutch conscripts executed the entire male population — perhaps as many as 400 men — of Rawagede near Jakarta. During the second police action, one army unit killed hundreds of men at Cililitan in West Java, and another about a thousand at Rengat, South Sumatra. Their officers were given medals.

“Unlawful violence was anything but a marginal phenomenon during the decolonisation war,” Van Reybrouck says. “On the Dutch side it was not limited to a few excesses at the bottom of the military ladder, but ordered and caused by officers in charge of platoons, companies and battalions. In Jakarta the high command tolerated and tacitly allowed it, the highest levels of the civilian administration were aware of it, and the supreme judicial authorities did not prosecute it.” Not even the chaplains protested: “Murder on patrol seemed more forgivable than masturbation under a mosquito net.”

Ultimate responsibility lay with the Dutch government and parliament. Initially the politicians were in unfamiliar territory: the resistance movements and the handovers in the French, Belgian, Portuguese, British and American empires were yet to come. And the Indies were many times more important in the Dutch psyche than colonies were for other imperial powers. But by the time of the second police action, independence had been won in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. There was no “direct order,” but the political decision to launch that all-out attack created conditions for mass violence.

In the end, the Americans pulled the aid strings, forcing the Dutch to transfer sovereignty to Indonesia within a flimsy “union” with Netherlands. The Dutch retained their enterprises and concessions, persuaded Indonesia to take on the colonial administration’s debts, and held out West New Guinea for future negotiations. The transfer of sovereignty was signed in the presence of Indonesia’s Mohammad Hatta and the new Dutch queen, Juliana, in Amsterdam on 27 December 1949, and Sukarno flew into Jakarta.

Not until January 1969 did accountability for war crimes begin when former conscript Joop Hueting gave the first public account of torture and summary executions. His television interview had been timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the second police action but was postponed a month so that veterans celebrating Christmas “would not suddenly be seen by their wives and children as war criminals.” Hueting received many letters with corroborating stories, but also death threats, and was vilified as a traitor. He needed police protection and moved to a safe location.

A limitation law in 1971 meant war crimes in Indonesia could no longer be prosecuted. Safely back in the Netherlands, Turk Westerling lived unscathed until his death, telling all and sundry what he had done. Only in 2015 did the Dutch government pay compensation to his victim’s families. No wonder so many of the Dutch are still starry-eyed about the Indies.

(No doubt unwittingly, Van Reybrouck had protected himself from one predictable Dutch comeback — “What about the Belgians?” — by writing a savage book about Belgium’s behaviour in the Congo ten years earlier.)

All these events are described supremely well in Revolusi. But Van Reybrouck draws a longer bow with the argument implied in the book’s subtitle: that Indonesia was crucial to the “birth of the modern world.” Its struggle did inspire anticolonial movements in Africa, and the Bandung conference called by Sukarno in 1955 was a seminal moment for what is now known as the Global South. Notably, a meeting of Egypt’s Nasser with China’s Zhou Enlai in Bandung set off a chain of events leading to seizure of the Suez Canal. But the victories of China’s communists in 1949, Vietnam’s at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and Cuba’s in 1959 eclipsed the Indonesian achievement.

After dancing between the great powers, confiscating Dutch assets, campaigning for West New Guinea and then against Malaysia, Sukarno’s balancing act collapsed. In 1965–66 the Indonesian army once again slaughtered members of the PKI and Indonesia became an inspiration more for the architects of reactionary bloodbaths against would-be revolutionaries. Jakarta viene (Jakarta is coming) was written on walls in Santiago ahead of Pinochet’s military coup against Salvador Allende’s left-wing government in 1973.

And was the revolusi really a revolution? As Cisca Pattipilohy, a journalist who was swept up in the Bandung elation, admitted to Van Reybrouck: “But it all came to nothing of course.” After her leftist husband died in jail following 1965 she went into lifelong exile in the Netherlands. As for the Indonesians, most stayed on Deck 3 for decades after merdeka (liberation). A small number of the political and military elite moved onto Deck 1, occupying Dutch houses and enjoying a version of the colonial lifestyle. Only from the 1980s did large numbers of ordinary Indonesians start moving up to Deck 2, making garments, shoes and bags for export and catering to mass tourism.

Van Reybrouck ends with a vignette, out at sea again, aboard a small boat near Sulawesi. Lamenting the environment damage wrought by palm oil production and pollution, he sees the need for a new kind of revolution, and finds its proponents among the pemuda of the world: “Anyone who believes that young people cannot make a difference in the struggle against global warming and the loss of biodiversity needs to study Indonesian history now.” Like Van Reybrouck, we must hope they use less violent tactics. •

Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
By David Van Reybrouck | The Bodley Head | 641 pages | $36.99

The post Brutal birth appeared first on Inside Story.

As historian Jayne Persian makes clear in her new book, Fascists in Exile, Australia’s record of prosecutions isn’t encouraging. In fact, she opens by describing the only war crime case to have been tried by any state Supreme Court in recent decades.

At its centre was Ivan Polyukhovich, a former port worker living in retirement in Adelaide, who found reporters at his door in 1986 asking for his response to allegations in the Soviet media that he had participated in mass murder of Jews in Ukraine in 1942–43. A visit to their ancestral village by his two stepdaughters had inadvertently tipped off locals that he was still alive and living in Australia.

Crimes committed during the second world war had by then become an uncomfortable topic, largely thanks to the work of ABC radio journalist Mark Aarons. He had produced powerful documentaries showing how numerous perpetrators of horrendous crimes in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe had slipped into Australia in early postwar resettlement schemes.

Aarons argues that authorities were consciously turning a blind eye to past criminality: “Many in Western intelligence came to regard yesterday’s Nazi war criminals and collaborators as today’s potential freedom fighters.” He quotes an official in the US Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps who thought it “a hell of a good opportunity to recruit some high-class informants.”

Aarons titled his second book on the subject War Criminals Welcome: Australia as a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals since 1945. As son of a Communist Party of Australia general secretary who had felt ASIO surveillance all his early life, and of Jewish background himself, his motivation and drive were understandable. But while Britain, the United States and Canada certainly resettled “right-wing undesirables,” including agents of postwar US and British intelligence, Persian finds “very little evidence” that authorities adopted these practices in Australia.

Many undesirables did get through, however, and Persian gives a vivid account of the sheer incompetence that allowed it to happen.

Around twelve million “displaced persons” had fled Central and Eastern Europe ahead of the Red Army at the end of the war in Europe, most of them to Germany and Austria. They included former concentration camp inmates, members of non-German forces aligned with the Nazis, forced labourers and civilians.

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency was formed to care for and, where possible, repatriate them. By 1947 about 1.2 million were still refusing to return to homes under Soviet control, and thus became “political refugees.” A successor to the UNRRA, the International Refugee Organization, took over the job of resettling them.

Some 170,000 of these “DPs” resettled in Australia between 1947 and 1952. The most numerous were the Poles (63,393) and those from the three Baltic nations (34,656), with Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Hungarians and Czechoslovakians each numbering in the many thousands.

Labor’s immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, was keen to attract young, fit, white bodies to help in Australia’s postwar reconstruction. He disingenuously assured the IRO that “our policy has no race prejudice,” but in practice first priority went to the “beautiful Balts” — many of them blonde and blue-eyed to reassure the Australian public.

Although Australia tends to pride itself on the large number of Holocaust survivors who resettled here, the DP scheme tried to exclude Jews. The government had no intention of accepting large numbers because of perceived Jewish “non-assimilability,” says Persian. “We are not anti-Semitic,” Calwell told the IRO, “but we will have to handle this matter carefully.” An instruction to Australian vetting teams in 1949 made the position clear: “The term [Jewish] refers to race and not to religion and the fact that some DPs who are Jewish by race have become Christian by religion is not relevant.”

Australian selection teams usually knew nothing of European languages or histories. Two Australian army intelligence officers arriving to beef up security vetting carried “elementary German phrase books.” One selection officer conducted 138 interviews in one morning. There was constant pressure from Canberra to “fill the ships.”

The DP camps, meanwhile, were hives of forgery — of false identities and nationality, back-stories to support them, and the removal of SS blood-group tattoos. The percentage claiming to have served only as medical orderlies during the war was “ridiculously high.”

The security services were less worried about old Nazis than Soviet spies slipping into Australia amid the DPs. One officer saw Jews in this light: to him they sat on a scale “from deep pink to a bright red.” In this, the prejudice that helped inflame the massacres in occupied Ukraine and elsewhere was echoed, conflating Jews and communism.

All this didn’t go completely unnoticed in Australia. Newspapers reported DPs making anti-Semitic remarks, threats and boasts about wartime killings. The national returned services league was concerned. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry worried the new arrivals would team up with “native Fascists.” (One its activists, Sam Goldbloom, slipped into the Bonegilla migrant camp in the guise of a plumber and in one shower block took photos of left armpit scarring, indicating removal of SS tattoos.) These stories were dismissed by Calwell.

Coalition ministers also refused to take action after the change in government in 1949, insisting there was no threat to Australia. Half a decade later, attorney-general Garfield Barwick said it was “time to close the chapter on war crimes” and let resettled individuals “turn their backs on past bitternesses and make a new life.”

It wasn’t until the mid 1980s that prime minister Bob Hawke, a noted friend of Israel, and his attorney-general Lionel Bowen took up the issue, fuelled by the efforts of Aarons and others. The deputy secretary of Bowen’s department, Andrew Menzies, reported that “more likely than not a significant number of serious war criminals had got into Australia.”

But time had expired under Australian law to follow the US example of reversing naturalisation on grounds of falsified identity and then simply deporting suspects. So Australia’s war crimes law was changed to allow prosecution for crimes committed elsewhere.

A new Special Investigations Unit, with a peak of fifty-two lawyers and historians, was given access to Aarons’ compendious archives along with lists sent by Soviet Union prosecutors and the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Eventually, they opened 841 files. But in most cases the prosecution threshold for both documentation and eyewitness accounts was too high. In the end, only twenty-seven were substantiated, and only three, all coincidentally living in Adelaide, were charged.

The evidence against Polyukhovich was strong. An impressive number of witnesses said he had been in a police auxiliary unit that machine-gunned more than 700 Jewish men, woman and children in a mass grave. He and two others had then forced a mother clutching a six-month-old child and her teenager into the grave and executed all three of them. Excavations led by Australian archaeologist Richard Wright found human remains with injuries and in positions that corroborated these accounts.

A day before his committal hearing on thirteen charges was due to start, Polyukhovich was discovered with a gunshot wound to the chest, later found to be self-inflicted. When he was eventually committed for trial in the SA Supreme Court on two charges, including mass murder, the case foundered on the question of whether he was the man in police uniform doing the shooting. The jury found him not guilty.

Of the two other prosecutions in Adelaide, one failed at the committal stage and the other was dropped after committal because of the accused’s poor health. The Special Investigations Unit wound up in 1992.

The process was at least “cathartic” for survivors, says Persian, and showed how war crimes trials could serve the “cause of truth.” She quotes the American historian of Latvian descent, Richards Plavnieks: “The crimes at issue are beyond punishment, the perpetrators beyond rehabilitation, and the victims beyond any fitting compensation. In the long term, then, the best that could realistically be hoped for was the discovery, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge about what happened. For the most part, that is what happened.”

Persian’s carefully documented account (fifty-two of its 182 pages are footnotes) is less successful in pursuing its second theme, promised in its title, that fascism was transplanted to Australia. For the most part, the DPs who came to Australia were small fry caught up in the paramilitaries organised by the Germans after capturing territories from the Soviet Union in 1941. She does not show any great penetration of fascist ideology in the interwar period, with the exception of minority groups like the Iron Guard in Rumania, the Arrow Cross in Hungary and the Iron Wolf in Lithuania.

But anti-Semitism was nevertheless rife in the captured lands, as elsewhere, and had needed little encouraging during the war. In Ukraine, it was heightened by the prominence of Jews in the Soviet leadership — men including Lazar Kaganovich, who imposed the farm collectivisation and grain quotas that caused the death of millions of Ukrainians by famine in 1932–33.

Joining a police auxiliary unit or Waffen-SS battalion was generally not an ideological choice, except that it was anti-Soviet. It paid, and the alternative was deportation to work in German factories or fortification projects. Once in, a refusal to join an “action” against Jews or others could bring summary execution: Persian instances two cases in Ukraine. But many were willing anyway. Most of Lithuania’s 350,000 Jews died within six months of German occupation, helped by local militias attached to the German death squad, the Einsatzgruppen.

Still, Persian insists that “fascist ideation” not only survived the war’s end but was “transnational and transcultural” in Australia. She picks out developments in two DP communities to back this argument.

One is the Hungarist Movement, which did indeed have a number of former Arrow Cross figures among its leaders and raised money by selling stamps with the images of Hitler and his allied Hungarian leader.  One of those figures, Laszlo Megay, won leadership of Hungarian Society in New South Wales and then the federal council of Hungarian associations. But the result was a split in the community, with many moving to a moderate new body.

The other is the Ustase, the broad name for Croatian groups aligned with the wartime regime installed by Hitler and Mussolini between 1941 and 1945. The main targets for its ethnic cleansing were Serbs. Some of its leaders had Jewish backgrounds, but under Nazi prompting it did persecute Croatia’s small Jewish population. At war’s end, the British army had handed back most of its surrendered forces to Tito’s communist partisans, who executed them en masse when they crossed into Slovenia at Bleiburg. Its leader, Ante Pavelic, escaped via Austria to Argentina on the “ratline” run by Croatian priests in the Vatican, and ran an independence movement in exile until his death in 1959.

Many of the Croats who came to Australia in the early postwar years did indeed revere Pavelic, who had headed the first semblance of an independent Croatian state in more than eight centuries. His portrait is still on the walls of their community clubs around Australia. But from the late 1950s came another wave of Croatian immigrants, jumping the border into Italy or allowed out of Yugoslavia as guest workers generating remittances. They and their children pursued a less nostalgic nationalism while building the good life in their new country.

A minority did join military training camps in the bush and some attempted violent action, but outside against Yugoslavia rather than inside against Australia. They joined two armed incursions, one in 1963 and another in 1972, both foiled by Yugoslav forces. For the most part, though, young Croatian Australians mounted noisy, non-violent demonstrations outside Yugoslav diplomatic missions and agencies.

Persian is reluctant to put aside the once-familiar trope of Croatians as violent bomb-throwers and fascists. “One group who apparently had no intention of keeping within ‘the laws of their country’ were far-right Croatians,” she states at one point. A new terrorist phase opened in the early 1960s, “an ultra-violent ‘demonstration’ of Croatian ‘existence’,” she writes. “Between 1963 and 1972 it has been calculated that the Ustasha engaged in at least sixty-five incidents of significant violence on Australian soil,” she goes on, before hastily adding “although this figure is debatable, as we shall see.”

Indeed, that last qualification is needed. As Persian acknowledges, the third volume of the official history of ASIO revealed that the security service believed “at least some” of those incidents were “false flag” attacks by Yugoslav security agents. My own book on the largest “terrorism” case, the Croatian Six bombing conspiracy of 1979, which Persian cites, helped raised the doubts that led to the current judicial review of the convictions by the NSW Supreme Court.

On the question of whether Croatian separatists were fascist as well as nationalist, Persian could have sought out first-hand accounts rather than questionable book sources. Fabian Lovokovic, for example, a member of the Ustase youth wing in the war and much-cited by her as a prominent postwar Pavelic acolyte, died in Sydney as recently as 2022, aged ninety-five, and was lucid and approachable to the end.

Still, all it takes is for a few teenagers at a football match to give a stiff-arm salute for reporters, fanning out to Croatian clubs and noting portraits of Pavelic still on the walls, or finding a screenprinter turning out t-shirts with the Ustase emblem, to inform us that Croatian fascism and anti-Semitism is still alive.

As for joining up with “native fascists,” several of the big-noters among the DPs did mingle with the tiny Australian national socialist groups, with little benefit to either party. Others found favour with stridently anti-communist individuals in the mainstream political parties, with the wartime Slovenian propagandist Ljenko Urbancic moving into the NSW Liberal Party through its ethnic council and helping found the enduring right-wing faction known as the “Uglies.”

Liberal MPs William Wentworth and Douglas Darby lent their names to the strident Captive Nations Council, but B.A. Santamaria, Frank Knopfelmacher and other influential anti-communist figures steered well clear of its dubious characters. Even Darby’s wife Esme, who headed the Australian Housewives’ Association, was concerned about “nasty slogans” at Captive Nations events.

It was all pretty marginal, even if often offensive. Fascists in Exile suggests deep-dyed adherents to national socialism pining to return and restore it in old homelands. For many DPs, content to settle in as “New Australians,” the book title could seem like a broad-brush slur. But for Persian the threat remains. Far-right and ultranationalist DP organisation continues apace, renewed by younger generations, she says. Ante Pavelic is still venerated in clubs around the country, and fascist activity in the form of anti-vax and other demonstrations draws in young members of ethnic groups. “DP groups are thus continuing to contribute to an ongoing (and increasing) normalisation of fascist views in the public sphere.” Really? •

Fascists in Exile: Post-War Displaced Persons in Australia
By Jayne Persian | Routledge | $79.99 | 182 pages

The post Distant crimes, nearby perpetrators appeared first on Inside Story.

It was quite a shock for the former Macquarie Group chair, one-time partner in the big Sydney law firm Allens, member of numerous business and artistic boards and recipient of the Order of Australia. A surprise, too, for other members of the board, who included a host of eminent Australians drawn from diplomacy, intelligence, business, academia and politics — not to mention the organisation’s blue-chip corporate sponsors, including BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and PwC.

The tabloid report, followed two days later by an attack in the conservative magazine Quadrant, was also the first indication for McCann’s Sydney-based organisation — the research institute China Matters — that its funding was being terminated by the federal government departments that had supported it financially since its founding five years earlier: Prime Minister and Cabinet, Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence, Home Affairs, Industry, Innovation and Science, and Attorney-General’s. To further hobble its work, China Matters was to lose its tax-deductible status for private-sector donations.

“It was a victim of a new sort of policy of completely shutting down all conversation about Australia–China relations that didn’t accord with the then government’s position,” says Michael Wesley, deputy vice-chancellor of Melbourne University and China Matters board member. “It was a deliberate silencing of an organisation that was committed to facilitating a diversity of opinion and a genuine multisectoral discussion and debate about Australia’s relations with its major trading partner.”

It has taken a while, but Scott Morrison’s former government eventually achieved that objective. Last week, China Matters announced it is shutting down. Its executive director, internationally known China politics scholar Linda Jakobson, has returned to her native Finland after ten years in Australia.

The institute’s offence was to advocate a more nuanced response to China’s energetic program of spending and diasporic string-pulling, which aimed to build its influence abroad. Examples cited by the News Corp tabloids included China Matters’s alleged urging of Australia to join Xi Jinping’s $1.5 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (despite the organisation having declared it “does not have an institutional view” on the issue) and its “pushing back” against the foreign influence legislation introduced by Malcolm Turnbull in late 2017. The tabloids’ article included “demonstrable falsehoods and defamatory insinuations,” McCann wrote at the time, but his protestations fell on deaf ears in the government.

China hawks were ascendant in government and the media, unleashed by the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan and Beijing’s clumsy handling of the epidemic. Scott Morrison was in weekly phone contact with Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a fellow Pentecostalist. Foreign minister Marise Payne had cast doubt on whether China could be trusted to trace the virus’s origins, and Morrison said an international inquiry should have “weapons inspector powers,” by which he meant that Chinese sovereignty should be overridden.

When leading business figures, among others, pointed out that this kind of language was sure to draw retaliation, hawkish commentators turned on them. Peter Jennings, then heading the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said they “have to understand the national interest is more important than a handful of wealthy businessmen continuing to make themselves rich dealing with an authoritarian China.”

The Sydney Morning Herald’s international and political editor, Peter Hartcher, described iron-ore tycoon Andrew Forrest as a “craven character” who had “chosen to campaign for a foreign authoritarian political movement” and “made the case for Australia to surrender.” Nine’s political editor at the time, Chris Uhlmann, said that “business captains and university chiefs have shown they can’t handle the truth. As long as the rivers of gold flowed, they were happy to urge silence…” But “silence means consent,” declared Uhlmann, including to the “imprisonment of a million Uighurs in Xinjiang.”

Events turned out as the government’s critics predicted. China cut back some $20 billion in non-strategic annual imports from Australia, including wine, beef, timber, barley and lobsters, with severe impacts in Australian regions. In response to an aggressive federal police raid on four official Chinese media correspondents, Beijing’s state security agency detained Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei (who ended up being jailed for three years).

When I approached key figures in the Morrison government who are likely to know how the decision to punish China Matters was made, none was willing to comment (if they replied at all). The funding cut took away nearly half of the organisation’s funding.

Money has certainly been part of the reason for the closure, Jakobson told me from Helsinki. But by the time Labor came to power the institute had decided not to attempt to have the grant and tax break restored. The system of departmental grants had changed by then, and regaining tax deductibility would have been a “tedious, long and costly process,” she said.

Instead, the board decided to wind up and put remaining funds towards a fellowship program in the Australia–China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney. The hope was that “there might be some really worthwhile, savvy, smart, dedicated Australians wanting to devote their careers to understanding what’s going on in the PRC.”

The China Matters story is likely to figure in the current review of federal government funding to national security–related research and education, commissioned by the prime minister’s department in early February. Heading the review is University of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese, a former head of Foreign Affairs and one-time director-general of the Office of National Assessments.

“These programs deepen public discussion, strengthen partnerships, and inform policy debates on national security matters,” the announcement said. The review would look at whether they remain “appropriately aligned to Australia’s national interests and strategic circumstances,” examining the performance of funded institutes over the past five years, and making recommendations “to assist [government] agencies conducting relevant activities while achieving value-for-money, administrative efficiency, and appropriate levels of governance, accountability, probity and transparency.”

The announcement had scarcely any general media coverage but did cause a brief buzz in Canberra security circles. Some instant commentary saw it as a “Get ASPI” exercise — a reference to the hawkish Australian Strategic Policy Institute, led for many years by Jennings.

“The announcement of a review last week by Peter Varghese is widely anticipated as a move in preparation for defunding ASPI,” wrote Labor official turned consultant Cameron Milner in the Australian.  “Such a decision should terrify all those worried that we’re not spending enough, not worrying enough and not preparing enough to defend our island continent.”

By defunding ASPI, Milner said, the government would be caving in to China’s so-called “fourteen demands,” as China hawks call the list of bilateral irritants handed to an Australian journalist in 2020 by a Chinese embassy diplomat — one of which was hostile scrutiny of contentious issues like the treatment of the Uyghur people — by a partially Australian government-funded institute, meaning ASPI.

ASPI’s prominence among Canberra voices raising alarm over China has certainly drawn criticism from quarters that would have appreciated China Matters’s approach. Concern was maintained when Jennings was replaced as ASPI’s head just before the 2022 election by another China hawk, Justin Bassi, who had been Marise Payne’s chief of staff when China Matters was defunded.

Two years into the Albanese government, ASPI no longer seems especially out of line with the stance of foreign minister Penny Wong and defence minister Richard Marles, who have been striving to balance diplomatic courtesy towards Beijing with support for closer alliance with the United States and large defence investments against a perceived Chinese threat. Nor can one imagine Varghese lending himself to any retribution, if that was the review’s aim.

Varghese has meanwhile been getting around the national-security think tanks and academic institutes. Although they number about fifty, he will probably concentrate on the top ten or so that get about 80 per cent of the government funding. They would include ASPI, the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University and two Australian National University outfits, the National Security College and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.

Those he’s spoken to think he will develop a set of principles to govern how the government funds strategic policy work rather than trying to prescribe what areas should get priority over others, which will change over time depending on trends and challenges.

As foreign affairs secretary, Varghese put funding into China Matters. Last year, introducing a China Matters oration by Kevin Rudd as University of Queensland chancellor, he made his feelings clear about the defunding decision. “China Matters knows that to understand China is not to endorse its policies,” he said. “By ceasing its funding the previous government apparently believed the opposite. This, despite the fact that China studies in Australia is going backwards.”

For her part, Jakobson hopes Varghese will recommend longer-term funding of key research institutes. “There has to be a willingness by the federal government to fund good strategic research which is not tied to three reports, two briefings and one conference a year, to give you an example of one of our contracts,” she says. “That’s not the way a genuine think tank can work. It can’t all be project-driven. It wears everyone out. There’s too many deliverables for the amount of money that’s being brought in.”

An endowment system would be better, she says, as was seen in the large sums the US Studies Centre received from the Howard government and Rupert Murdoch, and the Lowy Institute from property magnate Frank Lowy. “There has to be at least five-year if not a ten-year basic, foundational funding for a specialised institute like China Matters, which provides very specialised expertise on one country, a very important country.”

Jakobson sees a gap re-emerging in how Australia understands the People’s Republic of China. The Australia–China Relations Institute at UTS focuses on the bilateral relationship and the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World looks at a wide range of Chinese culture, she says. “But they don’t produce deep policy analysis of what’s going on in the PRC, which is what from the very beginning I saw Australia had a dire need for: to understand the drivers of what’s going on and why China’s making the decisions they are making.”

No doubt Peter Varghese is keenly aware of this gap. Meanwhile, the man whose government defunded China Matters, Scott Morrison, pursues his new post-parliamentary career as a defence industry consultant in partnership with Mike Pompeo. •

The post Think-tanked appeared first on Inside Story.

First came a period of strategic deception, during which his Hamas movement appeared to moderate its armed confrontation with Israel, notably by cutting rocket attacks, in return for large-scale economic aid from Qatar. That aid deal was tacitly approved by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw it as a way of helping tame Hamas while deepening the split in the Palestinian leadership between the Islamists of Hamas and the secular Fatah elements running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Then came the attack, delivered so surprisingly and with such indiscriminate violence that a harsh military response was inevitable. Sinwar then withdrew his surviving fighters, accompanied by as many Israeli hostages as they could capture. Having himself been part of a swap of 1000 Palestinian prisoners for just one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, he knew their value as bargaining chips.

Stinging at the deception, Netanyahu marshalled 50,000 soldiers and launched an air, land and sea campaign into Gaza with the aim of eliminating Hamas for good and freeing the hostages. So far, some eighty-five of the original 230 hostages have been released in a swap for Palestinian detainees. About one hundred are thought to remain alive, captive to Hamas or other militant groups.

After six months of military operations, the Israel Defence Force says it has killed about 13,000 of the estimated 30,000 fighters in Hamas’s military arm, including several senior unit commanders, for 260 soldiers of its own killed in Gaza operations. But Sinwar and other top leaders remain hidden and active.

For their part, Hamas health officials say 33,000 (among them 9000 women and 12,300 children) have died from Israeli attacks, with about 75,000 wounded and a further 7000 missing, believed buried in rubble. The figures, which seem widely accepted by international agencies and observers, don’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

The Israeli onslaught is the response Hamas expected. “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7,” said Khaled Mashal, a Qatar-based Hamas political leader, soon after the attack. “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”

If any Gazan citizens don’t agree with being put up as sacrifices like this, we don’t hear from them. In the daily stream of smartphone videos of bereaved survivors pulling their dead children from the rubble we haven’t seen Hamas being blamed for the bloodshed. And perhaps Gazan journalists working for Reuters, Associated Press, Al Jazeera and other media would hesitate to ask.

It took Israeli authorities some time realise that the death tallies and horrific video images made up the narrative mostly being seen by the outside world. Israel’s own media, with a few exceptions like the liberal newspaper Haaretz, concentrated on the violence against Israelis in the October attack, showing little of the carnage inside Gaza. After some weeks, Israeli embassies and lobby groups abroad began showing video and other evidence, emphasising child murder and sexual assault, to counter sympathy for the Gazans.

The high death toll and the destruction of more than two-thirds of dwellings in Gaza was meanwhile achieving the objectives stated explicitly by Mashal and other Hamas figures. They had seen the Palestinian cause slipping away, the West Bank being steadily annexed by Jewish settlements with little effective protest by Western powers pledged since 1993 to a two-state solution.

Under Donald Trump, the US embassy had been moved from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem: he was not holding out for a two-state settlement. Trump had also brokered the Abraham accords, which brought Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states closer to Israel: support for Palestinians seemed to be weakening among these Sunni powers.

Hamas set out to shatter this trend. “We knew there was going to be a violent reaction… But we didn’t choose this road while having other options,” said one Hamas official, Basem Naim. “We have no options.” It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told the New York Times in Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

Without going into the “context” sometimes used to explain or even excuse the 7 October attack, it’s useful to consider what Israel could have done instead of its all-out military response. What alternatives does it have now to pursuing it?

Cautioning voices in the early weeks made comparisons with America’s “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks. Could a more measured response, holding back the military while carefully assembling police evidence of the atrocious crimes committed by Hamas and other attackers on 7 October, have turned the moral tables? Bodies were quickly buried, and other forensic evidence lost, in the wave of anger and grief that swept Israelis.

And even then, what to do? Military experts say there is no way to eliminate an enemy hiding in cellars and tunnels in a dense urban setting without many civilian casualties. The battle of Fallujah, in 2004 during the Iraq war, and the Mosul siege against Islamic State in 2017 are comparable, except that in both cases most of the civilian population was able to flee beforehand. Even so, the Americans and Iraqis killed many of the remaining civilians and lost many soldiers, while the insurgents were not decisively eliminated.

Given the narrowness of Gaza and Egypt’s refusal to accept refugees (assuming Palestinians agreed to leave, knowing they might end up permanently expelled), the strip has hardly any space for safe refuge, and Hamas fighters would in any case move with civilians. Further slaughter of civilians would be unavoidable.

Netanyahu says Israel’s military is regrouping to push into Rafah in the south of the strip, against the Egyptian border, where 1.2 million displaced Gazans are camped and where the Israeli Defense Force claims the bulk of surviving Hamas fighters are hiding. Israeli spokesmen have suggested the IDF’s first move will be to seal the border and offer Hamas militants safe passage out to exile. If few accept, which seems likely, what then?

The operations in the north and centre of the Gaza strip have not been a clean sweep. Hamas elements remain, causing Israeli casualties, and a recent return to the large al-Shifa Hospital to ferret out hidden insurgents has resulted in more Gazan casualties. A Rafah attack and even more civilian deaths and injuries will only add weight to Sinwar’s grim calculus.

Israel’s main Western allies, meanwhile, are declaring it is time to stop — calls that intensified after a drone attack killed seven aid workers including Zomi Frankcom, an Australian. They are also preparing to deliver humanitarian aid themselves: the United States is building a new jetty and Britain will send a Royal Navy ship to land supplies.

Netanyahu is also facing mounting pressure inside Israel: for not giving priority to freeing the hostages; for failing to take responsibility, by resigning, for the security lapses that allowed the 7 October attack to happen; and for his earlier attempts to undermine judicial independence and wriggle out of corruption charges.

“If we enter into Rafah it will be a human disaster,” Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, told London’s New Statesman last week. “I don’t know how many Palestinians will die. I know that many Israelis [soldiers] will die. We have to assume rationally that Egypt will have to react. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will climb on the [border] fences.” Egypt, Jordan and other regional states will reassess relations with Israel.

Pressure of a different kind comes from within the Israeli cabinet, where extreme Zionists like national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir say they will topple Netanyahu if he baulks at attacking Rafah. Politically, he has every motive to keep up the military offensive.

At whatever point the Israeli government declares “mission accomplished” it will be left in control of 2.2 million destitute people and a Gaza in ruins, among them many Hamas sympathisers and a new generation seething for vengeance. Like the insurgent leaders in Fallujah, Sinwar might well have slipped away.

But at that point, too, Netanyahu knows that his days in power could end. The war has protected him against calls for elections or a reshuffle in the Knesset. But if it is over, and hasn’t been extended to new fronts — against Iran, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, or by settler attacks in the West Bank — Israel could then have a new leadership, probably still right-wing but perhaps less invested in Netanyahu’s policies.

That would bring an opening for Arab powers, the West, and the United Nations to assume responsibility for rebuilding and securing Gaza.

The US secretary of state Anthony Blinken has been working on a plan that would see a Gaza truce extended into a creation of a Palestinian state. The Washington Post reported in February that the ideas under discussion include the withdrawal of many, if not all, settler communities on the West Bank; a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; the reconstruction of Gaza; and security and governance arrangements for a combined West Bank and Gaza. Israel would be offered specific security guarantees and normalised relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Britain and the European Union are said to be supportive.

And Australia? Speaking at ANU this week, foreign minister Penny Wong indicated that Canberra was party to this thinking. Instead of putting Palestinian statehood at the end of negotiations, she said, “the international community is now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution.” Echoing ex–Shin Bet chief Ayalom, she argued that statehood would undermine Hamas, Iran and other extremists.

A reformed Palestinian Authority would be needed to run the state, with no role for Hamas. “Hamas is a terrorist organisation which has the explicit intent of the destruction of the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” Wong said.

(In a revised charter in 2017, Hamas said it would accept a Palestinian state within the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war only as a step towards complete settlement of the original pre-Israel territory. It was not opposed to Jews, it said, just Zionists. Netanyahu publicly ripped up a print-out of this less-than-reassuring charter.)

In Australia, the Coalition has quickly characterised Wong’s proposals as “rewarding terrorism,” as have various Israel-aligned lobby groups. Indeed, it will be hard to avoid Hamas getting credit. Among Palestinians, including those in the West Bank, opinion polls have shown support for Hamas and its attack has risen to 80 per cent.

In a plan circulated at the end of February, Netanyahu declared that Israel must maintain security control, including a 300-metre no-go zone at the Gaza borders and a wide corridor across the middle of the strip, and by tightly controlling the Egyptian border. He wants the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, kicked out. He proposes replacing the Hamas administration with local representatives “who are not affiliated with terrorist countries or groups and are not financially supported by them.” He continues to ridicule the idea of Palestinian statehood and says a date has been set for invading Rafah.

In other words, a Palestinian state would probably emerge only over Netanyahu’s political corpse. With the US presidential election getting nearer, Blinken’s time may also be running out.

Many Palestinians would also have to be convinced that the United States and other Western powers are sincere and determined. More than thirty years have passed since the Camp David accords set two states as the goal. Tareq Baconi, president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, is one who argues that the moment for a two-state solution has long passed, and that the idea of partition, which ignores the 1947 expulsion of Arabs from what became Israel, is inherently unjust and impracticable. Israeli journalist Dimi Reider has long urged that creative thinking be used to turn Israel’s “apartheid” system into a single entity that gives equal rights and security to Israelis and Palestinians.

Rebuilding Gaza will take decades and tens of billions of dollars, says senior UN economist Rami Alazzeh. Not only have many homes been destroyed, but water, sewerage, electricity, schools, administrative records and financial systems have also been devastated. The population is suffering dire physical and psychological distress.

Just possibly, though, the vista for a longer-term building of peace could be opening. Whether it’s a two-state solution, a single state or one that leads to the other is a field of literature in itself. Either requires a vast effort of trust and reconciliation in the embittered Holy Land. •

The post Hamas’s dark calculus appeared first on Inside Story.

It took a while for diplomats to realise they had a window into the mind of this reticent figure courtesy of a Westerner — an Australian, in fact —who had become part of Soeharto’s household a decade before these events and was to remain a key intermediary between the general and the West until Soeharto stepped down in 1998. In the words of an American diplomat in Jakarta at that time, Clive Williams was Soeharto’s “Australian whisperer.”

But as former Australian diplomat Shannon Smith writes in his intriguing biography, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher, Williams’s role was kept largely secret from the public for more than fifty years. “Those who knew him in an official capacity are confined to several dozen international diplomats, journalists and politicians, and they had national interest, and sometimes self-interest, in keeping his name, his position and his role out of the public spotlight,” says Smith. The man himself would divulge only that he came from Geelong. “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”

So who was Clive Williams? How did this cashiered Jehovah’s Witness missionary and self-trained chiropodist become attached to Soeharto? How important was he in the power transition and Soeharto’s long presidency? And what did he know about the manoeuvrings around the night of 30 September 1965? Thanks to exhaustive research, Smith has answers to the first three of these questions, but only a hint about the fourth.

Williams was born in Geelong in 1921 to a family on the edge of survival, his father shattered by two years as a German prisoner of war. His mother died when he was sixteen, robbing him of close emotional support just as he was coming to the realisation that he was homosexual.

Feeling “hunted” in Geelong, Smith conjectures, Williams needed somewhere to “hide in plain sight.” He found it as a Jehovah’s Witness. Though the sect had only about 2000 followers in Australia, it was well known thanks to its early adoption of new technologies. Sound vans cruising the streets, radio broadcasts, pamphlets and foot-in-the-door house calls — all these were used pushed its millenarian belief that Christ would soon return to Earth and replace all worldly governments with a paradise populated only by Witnesses.

The group was unpopular, of course, and as Australia entered the second world war it was also suspect for its pacifism. Its eventual banning in 1941 added to the attraction for Williams. “An ardent, proselytising Jehovah’s Witness must have felt a real adrenalin rush pitting themself against community standards, breaking laws, and actively seeking pushback or confrontation,” Smith thinks. “Living in a society where one felt pressure for being ‘other’ or ‘less,’ such as a homosexual, it would have been an ideal outlet for barely twenty-year-old Williams to fight back, especially where the attention was on one’s religious beliefs not sexuality.”

Having started out as a self-supporting “pioneer” roaming the towns in a sound-van, Williams graduated to a central role in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Sydney, got exempted from call-up as a religious minister even as the sect continued to operate semi-underground, and then, in 1950, gaining induction into the sect’s global training centre, Gilead, in upstate New York. The following year, when his class was dispatched as missionaries, he landed in Manado, the province in the north of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.

Williams lasted not quite three years in that role. Smith found a cryptic reference in the sect’s records for 1954 — “During the course of the year it became necessary to disfellowship a person from the congregation for unchristian conduct” — but Williams was otherwise expunged from the sect’s history books. He might have been expelled for attending more to charity than conversions, Smith generously observes, but his sexuality seems a more likely cause.

Aged thirty-six, Williams then moved to Semarang in Central Java, taking with him a younger Manadonese man. “It was also a good place to lose oneself or, indeed, hide from view. A place to shake off a religion and find some spirituality, to conceal sexuality, and to reset,” Smith writes. “Over the next few years, Williams delved into Javanese culture, became fluent in the local languages and established a series of lifelong friendships. Like many who enter witness protection, he emerged with a new identity.”

Despite his humble schooling, Williams had always been well spoken, had become a confident speaker from years as a missionary, and no longer had a mission to convert the local Muslims. He quickly tapped into the immense demand for English-language tuition in the new nation, particularly among upper-echelon Indonesians who could pay for classes and textbooks.

Word of Williams’s activities reached Tien Soeharto, wife of the rising army officer. The two struck up a rapport: “he delighted her with his demonstrations of Western etiquette and customs, he became the couples’ English tutor, and like most Australians, he was practical and handy at fixing things (including cutting her in-grown toenails).” Clive also followed international affairs: “he had travelled to London and New York! And his knowledge about the human condition, gained from travelling around the cities and isolated communities of Australia and his missionary work, was extremely broad. To the inward-looking Javanese couple, Williams was a revelation.”

It was during these years, the 1950s, that Soeharto rose to command the army’s crucial Central Java region, building a patronage style of leadership bolstered by commodity smuggling, protection rackets and other business activity. In the process he attracted life-long loyalty from army colleagues like Sudjono Humardhani, Ali Murtopo and Yoga Sugama and among Chinese-Indonesian compradore businessmen like The Kian Seng (known as Mohammed “Bob” Hassan) and Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim).

Eventually the business deals got too much for the puritanical army head, Abdul Haris Nasution, who transferred Soeharto to the new staff college in Bandung in 1959. But that didn’t stop Soeharto’s rise. He took command of a new Jakarta-based ready-reaction force called Kostrad that also had the job of regaining Western New Guinea from the Dutch. Tien stayed in Semarang through this period, with Williams becoming a trusted male presence while frequently flying to Jakarta to see Soeharto.

Smith takes us through much of the still-emerging history and analysis of the events of 1965, though he misses some parts of the story, notably the role of the double agent Sjam Kamaruzaman, an army intelligence asset inside a “special bureau” attached to the top leadership of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

What Smith’s research reinforces, though, is that neither the CIA nor other foreign intelligence agencies were masterminding events. Although Western powers quickly piled in with propaganda blaming the killing of six army generals on the PKI, they were taken completely by surprise by the nature of the military putsch and knew virtually nothing about Soeharto. A provincial figure, he had not been among the more cosmopolitan Indonesian officers given US army training.

As Soeharto moved to undercut Sukarno, first by facing down his attempt to appoint someone else army commander, then by forcing the handover of executive powers in the famous 11 March 1966 letter Sukarno was intimidated into signing, then by becoming acting president in 1967, foreign embassies were baffled by the opaque responses they were getting from the emerging leader. When he said “yes” it could mean yes, or maybe, or just “I have heard you,” or even a no.

Then, in mid 1966, Williams was discovered by American ambassador Marshall Green and soon became an indispensable intermediary for the embassy, and vice-versa. He would often turn up on the doorstep of an American diplomat’s house at the behest of the acting president, and the embassy also chose Williams for reciprocal approaches.

Williams was very different from other potential intermediaries including members of the ring of ex-Semarang army officers serving as “special advisors” to Soeharto, or foreign minister Adam Malik and other civilian politicians who sometimes had different political agendas. He was non-political, incorruptible and simply not interested in money. He understood “Soeharto’s nuances and communication style; he could read Soeharto’s mood and could tell whether he was angry or prevaricating or anxious, and he could anticipate Soeharto’s thinking and reaction to an issue.” He also spoke both English and Indonesian fluently, “ensuring there were no linguistic or cultural misunderstandings.”

By 1967, Soeharto was ensconced in the large house at Jalan Cendana in Menteng, the old inner suburb of Dutch officialdom. Williams took a small house, connected by gate, at the back. He would come in for meals, take Soeharto through what the foreign media were saying, coach the six children in English, and guide Tien through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The Australian embassy was two years behind Marshall Green in discovering Williams as the best conduit to Soeharto. Or at least its mainstream diplomatic staff were. An army attaché, Colonel Robert Hughes, met Williams in Central Java in 1966 and got a meeting with Soeharto, with Williams interpreting. Murray Clapham, a suave young officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, became friendly with Williams, as did his chief of station Kenneth Wells.

The ABC’s correspondent, Tim Bowden, also discovered Williams and persuaded him to give a radio interview in October 1966. While current politics were barred, the hour-long encounter went deeply into the kind of divination that Soeharto — like many Javanese — practised as they reached major decisions.

But these insights were disregarded by Australia’s ambassador from 1966 to 1969, Max Loveday, a rigid and self-important character who insisted on using conventional channels, notably the Indonesian foreign ministry and Malik, its minister, whom Soeharto distrusted. The Australian government consequently made a number of diplomat blunders by pushing proposals that Williams would have advised were bound to be refused. A visit by prime minister John Gorton in 1968 to cement reopened political contact was a near failure, redeemed mostly by the Indonesian-language fluency of Gorton’s wife Bettina.

It was not until Gordon Jockel — who knew about Williams from a memorandum the exasperated Ken Wells circulated in Canberra behind Loveday’s back — became ambassador in March 1969 that the embassy tapped into the Whisperer.

Smith’s biography ends about there, with the relationship from 1969 to Williams’s death in 2001 to be covered in a second volume. Those who met Williams over these decades know he remained fervently loyal, especially to Tien Soeharto (and her memory after she died in 1996). During the tension over East Timor he remained a vital channel for Canberra.

His house in Menteng remained a modest one, as did the former home and hobby farm of Soeharto himself by the standards of Marcos, Mobutu or Putin (or even Sydney’s harbourside mansions these days). Whether he exercised any restraint over Soeharto’s children in their business dealings would be interesting to discover. From the available evidence it would seem not. Any role he took in the nuptials of Soeharto’s daughter Titiek to the dashing special forces officer Prabowo Subianto would be of added interest now that Prabowo is president-elect.

On the last question — what did Williams know about 1965–66? — Smith has found only tantalising clues. When a German-born Jesuit, Franz Magnis-Suseno, met him just prior to the 30 September coup, he was surprised by Williams’s conviction that Soeharto was ready to act against the communists. “What was clear from Magnis-Suseno’s account of his conversation with Williams — and it wasn’t a [later] recollection, he recorded it in his diary — was that Soeharto was either planning his own initiative or preparing to respond to another scheme,” Smith writes.

But then Smith backs away. “The 30 September Movement  seems to have been no more than an old-fashioned army putsch by disgruntled middle-level officers using whatever support they could get,” he writes. “But it was a clumsy, poorly planned operation and probably didn’t expect Soeharto’s quick counter-reaction. It might also have been subverted by Soeharto; he certainly didn’t orchestrate the movement but it is very reasonable to assume he knew the plans in advance, and that he both infiltrated the putsch and then took action against it.”

So Smith, despite have read and cited much of the still-expanding literature about 1965, hangs back from the logical leap that other scholars are making, and that the Jesuit’s diary points towards. This is that Soeharto’s own spooks fired up impressionable middle-ranking officers to mount the 30 September putsch against pro-American generals allegedly about to overthrow Sukarno, in the hope of drawing the PKI into a power grab, thereby justifying an army counter-coup.

We live in hope that the second and third volumes of David Jenkins’s account of Soeharto’s rise to power will clarify further, and that Williams grew less discreet in his later years. So far, though, Soeharto’s Australian whisperer remains largely enigmatic. •

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher: The Enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume 1, 1921–1968
By Shannon Smith | Big Hill Publishing | 254 pages | $34.99

The post Soeharto’s Australian whisperer appeared first on Inside Story.

Australian citizen Yang Hengjun’s arrest, imprisonment and suspended death sentence for espionage could draw comparison with the case of Francis James, the eccentric publisher of the Sydney church newspaper the Anglican, who Gough Whitlam managed to spring from a Chinese jail in 1973 after convincing Beijing he was a harmless prankster.

But the two cases are quite dissimilar, especially as the comparison doesn’t give Yang credit for his genuine efforts for liberal reform in China.

As recounted by Japan-based ex-diplomat Gregory Clark, who covered the Francis James case for the Australian, James had concocted an entirely fictitious account of travelling to the Chinese nuclear test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang and sold it to the London Sunday Times in 1969. After he was exposed by Derek Davies of the Far Eastern Economic Review as having skirted around rather than visited China, James invented another preposterous story and then went openly to China in November 1969. He was promptly arrested as a suspected spy.

Why so reckless? Getting arrested was deliberate, Clark conjectured. “Get into China via the Canton Fair, behave suspiciously, get arrested dramatically and mysteriously, and the world will have no choice but to believe that here indeed is a person who could once have roamed the secret nuclear installations of northwest China,” he wrote.

“True, being arrested by the Chinese police in those days was no joke,” Clark went on. “But he has a plan. Because he behaves outrageously and courts arrest, the Chinese will quickly realise he is a harmless eccentric playing games and throw him out of the country. Being expelled from China will add even more to the James legend.”

But things don’t quite work out that way. “The Chinese decide that he is not mad or playing games, that he really is on some secret spy mission. What James thought would be a short-term escapade ends up as incarceration and interrogation for four years. The joke very nearly ends up as a tragedy.”

Yang’s case could very well turn into a tragedy. His death sentence has been suspended for two years on condition he doesn’t re-offend. How he might spy from a prison cell is a mystery, but Chinese security would no doubt find some evidence if it wanted to. And Yang, fifty-eight, has a large lesion on one of his kidneys that could be renal cancer, treatable if operated on in time. In a previous high-profile case, that of detained Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Chinese authorities allowed liver cancer to develop beyond hope of treatment.

Despite five years of detention and hundreds of interrogation sessions, China’s Ministry of State Security could only come up with one plausible accusation of espionage. This involves an operation thirty years ago, in 1994–97, when Yang was working for the ministry itself as an undercover officer in Hong Kong as the territory’s handover from Britain to China was approaching. Back then, according to the limited summary of evidence released with the verdict, Yang passed on forty documents containing Chinese secrets to Taiwan’s intelligence service.

But Yang had long told confidants that his superiors in State Security gave him the job of opening contact with Taiwan operatives to help ensure a smooth transition and had been happy with his trading some low-level information to win confidences. So pleased with his performance had his superiors been that they let him go to Washington with his then wife for two years as a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, while still on the ministry’s books.

The resurrection of the Hong Kong episode suggests that Yang’s interrogators found no evidence of espionage in the decades since, unless it has been withheld. So the arrest must have been for something else. And the answer surely lies in the evolution of Yang’s career as an academic researcher, popular fiction writer and political blogger, and how State Security, as guardian of the Chinese dictatorship, saw his work as a challenge and threat.

Early on, Yang certainly teased the ministry: not something that should be done lightly given it is perhaps the largest intelligence agency in the world, with an estimated 110,000 staff encompassing foreign intelligence, domestic counter-intelligence and increasingly cyber and industrial espionage. It even has its own think tank, the Institute for Contemporary International Relations, to engage with foreign counterparts and release open-source assessments. At its favoured hotel in central Beijing, troublesome figures are invited in for a “cup of tea” as a warning.

Reflecting the ministry’s staid, bureaucratic character, its cadres are supposed to be pillars of communist rectitude. At the insistence of its former political master, premier Zhou Enlai (the leader Whitlam prevailed on to release James), it has forsworn “honey traps” (sexual entrapment) and doesn’t seem to go in for overseas “wet jobs” (assassinations), at least according to John Byron, the pseudonymous co-author of Claws of the Dragon, a book based on the personal papers of Kang Sheng, Mao Zedong’s spy chief and orchestrator of his purges.

Yang tried to liven up that dour image with a trilogy of spy novels published in Hong Kong and Taiwan around 2004–05. According to those who’ve read them, they contain the mix of sex and murder found in spy books about Western intelligence services. The hero, a Chinese named Yang, is a double-agent in a vicious war between the State Security and the CIA. Smuggled copies gained a wide readership in China.

Yang joined the ministry’s elite intake as a brilliant graduate of Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of the country’s best foreign-studies schools. He received the Hong Kong assignment after a posting to the foreign department of Hainan’s provincial government.

But his role ended with his Washington sojourn. In 1999 his then wife, a professional interpreter and translator, gained a skilled migration visa for Australia. Yang emigrated too, as her dependent. The move appears not to have been a “defection.”

In Australia, as well as writing his spy books, Yang plunged back into academic study, supported by his wife, first at the University of New South Wales and then at the University of Technology Sydney, where he gained a PhD in 2007 for a thesis on political messaging on the Chinese internet, then subject to tightening surveillance and blocking.

Research contacts enabled Yang to develop a huge following for his Chinese-language blogs discussing political reform, says his UTS doctoral supervisor, Feng Chongyi. The large following gained him some income but he also relied on hospitality from friends and contacts. At some point his marriage broke up.

Although his spy books had been “too sensitive for China,” Feng tells me, Yang continued to travel in and out of China, by then as an Australian citizen. One awkward moment came on a visit to Guangzhou in 2011, when local police officers detained him. Uprisings were then sweeping the Middle East in the Arab Spring and China’s security apparatus had been told to nip any local buds. With help from Julia Gillard’s government, Feng got Yang released after four days on the condition that his detention was not publicised.

At their peak, says Feng, Yang’s blogs were followed by about a hundred “Yang Groups” in some fifty Chinese cities. But with Xi Jinping’s ascension as Communist Party secretary in October 2012 the atmospherics started changing. Xi methodically purged all rival factions, including the Shanghai faction of former leader Jiang Zemin and the Communist Youth League faction of predecessor Hu Jintao (who was later frogmarched out of the 2022 party congress that gave the green light for Xi’s indefinite rule).

Xi also cracked down on civil society: lawyers, academics, media outlets, non-government organisations. With his blogging career faced with ever-tightening controls, Yang became noticeably more cautious in what his writing and speaking, according to a foreign correspondent he used to meet in Beijing. His high-level party contacts, including former vice-president Zeng Qinghong, a key lieutenant to Jiang Zemin, were themselves on the outer.

Yang had also embarked on a relationship that raised questions among his following. His new wife, Yuan Ruijuan (also known as Yuan Xiaoliang), had been labelled a “patriotic blogger” — or, more disparagingly, a wumao (fifty-cent warrior) for the half-yuan these bloggers were supposedly paid for each post supporting the official line. Her reputation sat uneasily with Yang’s long-time aim of political opening. Some wondered whether Yang had been playing both sides of China’s internal divide.

Nonetheless, Yang was in the sights of State Security. The contacts he had made with Zeng Qinghong, a former vice-premier who had been a key lieutenant of Jiang Zemin, would have been enough to ensure that. “The CCP reforming wing under Zeng embraced globalisation whole-heartedly and pushed for alliance with the West,” says Feng. “Zeng even went so far as to find an exit for the CCP.”

In March 2017 Feng Chongyi was himself detained during a research trip in Guangzhou. Before pressure from Canberra and his university secured his release, Feng says he was questioned intensively about Yang’s activities and connections. “They said: Women hui shoushi ta! We will get rid of him!” Feng recalls.

Feng then helped Yang get a two-year visiting fellowship at New York’s Colombia University, his income to be augmented by informal daigou trading of American luxuries to China. After the fellowship ended in January 2019, Yang and his second wife, heading back to Australia, made the fateful decision to visit relatives on the way. Unlike Francis James, it was not a showdown gesture: Yang must have thought the State Security officers in his intake, by then in senior ranks, would keep a lenient eye on him.

“I told him not to go back to China,” says Feng. “He said, if they want to take me, they would have done it long ago.”

Yang’s arrest may partly have been precautionary, aimed at silencing a potentially influential figure ahead of two big anniversaries coming up in 2019: the centenary of the 4 May 1919 student uprising over the foreign concession ports reaffirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

China’s relations with US-aligned nations were already spiralling downwards. A month earlier, Canada had arrested Huawei’s heiress-apparent Meng Wanzhou on a US warrant for breaking sanctions on Iran. In return, two Canadians working in China had been arrested, effectively as hostages. Members of the Five Eyes intelligence group, which includes Australia, were blocking Huawei from their 5G mobile networks on suspicion the technology could be used for Chinese espionage or sabotage. The party and State Security had added to the deteriorating atmosphere with a new intelligence law requiring all Chinese citizens and enterprises to cooperate with intelligence services when asked.

In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull’s government had enacted new laws on foreign influence while Yang was in New York. A month after his detention Canberra blocked the Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo, a permanent resident, from re-entering Australia because of payments to politicians allegedly to build pro-China sentiment.

Yang was in contact with Australian officials preparing the anti–foreign influence crackdown. In New York he appears to have engaged with Boxun, a US-based website and news aggregator that promotes democracy and human rights and exposes alleged corruption in China. Blocked in China itself, Boxun has been subject to cyber-attacks attributed to Beijing. Its founder, Meicun “Watson” Meng, has strongly defended Yang against his latest charges.

Yang’s harsh sentence has undermined the feeling in Canberra that relations with China, though never expected to be warm, were at least unlikely to deliver more shocks. The hope, no doubt, was that Yang would be released after sentencing for time served.

To Canberra’s China hawks, the sentence suggests that Beijing wants Australians to be a bit afraid. And the court’s two-year good behaviour: did that apply to the Australian government, they wonder, as well as Yang?

But Richard McGregor, the China specialist at Sydney’s Lowy Institute and author of widely praised book, The Party, plays down the idea that Beijing is sending a message to Australia. “It’s less about Australia and more about them,” he tells me. “On the one hand, the MSS [State Security] is likely largely indifferent to the deleterious impact Yang’s verdict will have on relations with Australia. But you could imagine that State Security deliberately demanded the harshest sentence possible as a warning to pro-democracy activists that they are risking their lives.”

For State Security, foreign relations are mere collateral damage. So is economic confidence. After a revised anti-espionage law introduced last July expanded the range of activities that can be considered espionage, raids targeted US-linked consultancy and due-diligence firms.

As the well-informed Hong Kong journalist and academic Wang Xiangwei has pointed out, State Security has gone public with its warnings, launching a WeChat account last August. “Since then, it has boldly asserted itself not only on espionage matters but also on national and international topical issues ranging from China–US relations to economic subjects, including one in which it warned against badmouthing China’s economic growth prospects,” Wang wrote.

Then, late last year, State Security put out posts blasting people who were bearish about China and “badmouthing” China’s economic growth prospects, Wang said. A few weeks later, in late January, it laid out ten conditions — mainly concerning national security, state secrets and anti-espionage law — that could lead to questioning by its agents.

State Security is unlikely to be doing this without Xi’s firm approval. Minister Chen Yixin is a longtime associate of Xi — so close that he is believed to be working on a new chapter of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the official ideology that ranks Xi with Mao. A “pillar” of state security seems likely to join existing pillars of the economy, diplomacy, military, environment, legal affairs and culture in the official document.

Without a signal from Xi, no one in Beijing is likely to resist the expanded ministry. “In any political system it’s difficult to push back against the internal security service,” says Lowy’s McGregor. “Eventually with wolf-warrior diplomacy there was a top-level political intervention and it largely stopped. So far, the MSS’s role seems very much in line with the direction Xi Jinping has set for the country. The only incentive in China is to exceed what you think the leader wants.”

In the meantime, Anthony Albanese is no Gough Whitlam, and Xi Jinping is no Zhou Enlai, and for the China of 2024, unlike in 1973, the Russians are its second fiddle and the Americans fearful of its rise. The best hope for Yang appears to be an effort to stress his precarious health and, unfairly as it may be, downplaying the seriousness of his challenge to the Party.

The MSS cadres are unlikely to know James Thurber’s 1939 story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” or the 1947 Danny Kaye movie, but they might have seen the 2013 remake with Ben Stiller. •

The post Collateral damage appeared first on Inside Story.

Half a dozen members of Marape’s 105-strong multi-party coalition have already peeled off, blaming the government for poor handling of the pay dispute that sparked the police strike. But Marape says he is confident of withstanding any no-confidence motion likely to be proposed in the 118-member chamber.

What has been called a payroll glitch resulted in sharp cuts to many public servants’ fortnightly pay, including cuts of around half for low-ranking staff in the police, prison service and other agencies. Victims of the error in Port Moresby walked off the job on 10 January and besieged the national parliament.

After word spread by mobile phone, mobs took the opportunity to plunder shops and trading stores, some of which were set on fire. Extra police were flown in and a call-out of the battalion at Port Moresby’s Murray Army Barracks restored order that night, reinforced by a two-week state of emergency that has now expired. Damage is estimated at approaching one billion kina (A$406 million) and the bodies of twenty-two victims have been found, some presumed killed by store owners and their security guards, others trapped in buildings set on fire.

The belief that government bungling lay behind the strike is not much questioned. “The lack of dialogue by the police with their police association, let alone with management or other agencies over an issue that could be fixed in days, if not hours, was certainly strange,” says Paul Barker, director of the Port Moresby–based Institute of National Affairs.

Soon after the riot, conspiracy theories raced through social media. Why were some businesses targeted while others, including large adjoining businesses without heavy protection, were left untouched? What will the police and troops do with the stolen goods they seize in their house-to-house searches? Was the looting somehow instigated to rattle confidence in Marape ahead of the expiry of the grace period?

Former prime minister Peter O’Neill, ousted by Marape in a 2019 no-confidence vote and soundly defeated in the 2022 election, is among those calling from the opposition bench for Marape’s dismissal. With business interests including an electronics chain, a hotel and a brewery, O’Neill has ample resources to cultivate parliamentary backing.

Another possible contender is Belden Namah, who quit Marape’s Pangu Pati in mid January. A Duntroon-trained army officer convicted of mutiny over the hiring of British and African mercenaries to deal with the Bougainville rebellion, his parliamentary career has been stormy. As the representative of a constituency where Malaysian loggers are active, he appears not to lack resources either: he was once readmitted to Sydney’s Star Casino despite an allegation of sexual harassment because he was classified as a high roller.

Government leaders, meanwhile, are casting around for short-term remedies. Telecommunications minister Timothy Masiu has threatened to shut down social media platforms. Marape says he and National Capital District governor Powes Parkop will look at applying a vagrancy law to restrict “unnecessary” movement into Port Moresby. “People have proven they are not fit to live in the city,” he said.

This kind of response shows that politicians are refusing to recognise the changes in the capital that are making it more difficult to govern. Most of all, they are ignoring growing population pressures on government services and agencies.

Just over a year ago, Port Moresby’s main hospital was revealed to be storing the bodies of deceased patients in an open shed because the morgue was full. A hasty mass burial was organised, but the bodies have no doubt continued to overflow. As PNG doctors’ association head James Naipao pointed out, the hospital was designed for the capital’s official population figure of about 400,000, but in reality the population is more than three times that number.

The same goes for the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, as the police are named. Numbering about 7200, including civilian staff and reserve officers, it has grown by only about 2000 officers since independence in 1975, a period in which Papua New Guinea’s population has trebled to an estimated eleven million. The last census was in 2011, its findings flawed partly because thieves at one stage stole the central tally room’s computers. A census due in 2021 was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and is now planned for later this year.

Annual population growth is generally put at 3 per cent, meaning the present population will double in less than twenty-five years. The pressure of numbers heightens the likelihood of more explosions of opportunistic looting in Port Moresby and similar unrest in the crowded port city of Lae.

The population estimate means PNG has one police member for about 1500 citizens, a third of the widely recommended ratio of 1:450. Marape’s announcement last month that police numbers will be expanded to 10,000 within five years, backed by Anthony Albanese’s pledge of A$200 million for a new police college and specialist training, is a belated attempt to remedy the security problem.

Whether the PNG government can put up its share of the necessary funding remains to be seen. In 2020 the international consultancy Deloitte said the present force needed an additional 126 million kina annually to cover its funding gap and a one-off capital injection of about 3.9 billion kina to deliver its service mandate. Neither happened.

Despite recent panics in Australian and American defence circles over China’s offers of security aid to Pacific island nations — which Marape happily countered by signing defence pacts with Canberra and Washington — recent events in Port Moresby show that PNG’s main security problem is internal.

Meanwhile, life in Port Moresby divides into two classes. Well-off visitors and wealthy expatriates and local residents stay in hotels or live in apartment blocks barricaded against the city’s poor and its raskol gangs by razor wire, armed guards and Dobermans. These well-off people, institutions and commercial enterprises are protected by at least 30,000 private security guards, about three times the number of police and troops combined. A further unknown number of people work for unregistered security groups. Even so, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Port Moresby as the sixth “least liveable” city in the world.

Outside, many if not most locals live in settlements with uncertain land tenure rights and limited water, sanitation and electricity services. They journey to workplaces and markets constantly alert to possible theft and assault. Bags, phones and watches are snatched; sometimes the thieves use homemade pipe guns to relieve office workers of a few kina or even the shoes on their feet.

“If you need the police and you want them to come to your village or wherever, you’ve got a real problem,” says Sinclair Dinnen, a specialist on Pacific crime and security at the Australian National University. “The first thing they will ask for is a payment, ostensibly to pay for fuel, and they do need fuel, but there’s quite a lot of rent-seeking behaviour across the police force — given the fact they can get away with it and people expect to pay the police to assist them, particularly if it involves travelling.”

In urban settlements, local committees often provide their own security. “Most people do not rely on the uniformed police for their policing needs,” says Dinnen. “If something goes missing, you go to your local networks, the committees. Sometimes for a small fee, they will eventually find out who stole your radio and maybe arrange for it to be returned. The police would not be interested in that kind of stuff.”

This lack of support partly reflects a widespread feeling that living in a city is somehow un-Melanesian. Founding prime minister Michael Somare argued against urbanisation in the 1970s, and academics have written of “ambivalent townsmen.” But the “new generations of people who have grown up in towns and who are not familiar with the day-to-day rhythms of village life are now growing in number,” say contributors to Papua New Guinea: Government, Economy and Society, a recent book by ANU and University of PNG researchers. “These people have made cities their permanent homes,” they add, while feeling obliged to note that “in some ways, the legitimacy of Melanesian urbanism is yet to be established.”

Urban investment often worsens inequalities, say the researchers, because government funds are “co-opted by political patronage.” Funds are spent on iconic projects valued by the urban elite rather than on housing, water supply and sanitation, especially in the settlements.

The elite want to position Port Moresby as a global city and Papua New Guinea as a middle power in its region. Money goes into the international airport, new roads to the top hotels, facilities to host regional games, and a shorefront pavilion to host the 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (accompanied by the baffling purchase of forty luxury Maseratis and three Bentleys).

As well as the neglect of settlements, international events directed at global audiences have often entailed “intensified policing of marginal groups seen as undermining the modernist aesthetics of orderliness and prosperity,” say the researchers, and in some cases forcible relocation. The informal economy is also a target, notably the roadside betel-nut traders catering to the widespread fondness for this mild narcotic.

In 2022, newly re-elected prime minister Marape and capital governor Parkop turned up for the launch of a twenty-two-storey apartment building on reclaimed foreshore land obtained for ninety-three years by a Malaysian entrepreneur for an annual fee of just 8400 kina. Police evicted the previous squatters on adjacent Paga Hill and dumped them on unserviced land far on the city fringe.

Parkop thanked the developer for having trust in the capital city and ensuring modern facilities for accommodation. The city government had devised the “Amazing Port Moresby” global branding to promote it as a liveable city, he said, “but the government can’t do it alone.”

The governor has also announced several initiatives to improve the livelihoods of ordinary residents, including a Settlements into Suburbs project and a Yumi Lukautim Mosbi (Let’s Care for Moresby) community awareness drive. As Paga Hill shows, though, the wealthy tend to get the breaks while the poor risk being deported as vagrants. A reshuffle in parliament is unlikely to change this anytime soon. •

The post Open season appeared first on Inside Story.

The mass adulation came as Albanese — like a swathe of Australia’s politicos, strategic thinkers and business leaders — embraced India as the best available escape from dependency on China. Add to that the fact that the fast-growing Indian community is made up of the ideal sort of migrant: well-educated, professionally skilled, prosperous, English-speaking, pious but moderate and even cricket-loving.

India may well turn out to play a key economic role for Australia one day, and the Indian community, now nearly 800,000-strong and the second-largest foreign-born component of the population (after those from Britain), has all the qualities claimed for it.

But since the mass rally in Sydney’s former Olympic stadium in May, the lustre has come off Narendra Modi. Longstanding concerns about where he is taking India are getting more air, and other members of the Quad grouping lined up against China, and their Five Eyes intelligence allies, are questioning his scruples.

Most pointedly, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau revealed in September “credible allegations” that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist gunned down in British Columbia in June. Canada immediately expelled India’s chief intelligence official in Ottawa

India called the allegations “absurd” and responded to the expulsion by sharply cutting the number of Canadian diplomats in New Delhi. But the following month, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the ABC he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter.”

Then, on 29 November, the US Department of Justice announced the prosecution of an Indian man allegedly commissioned by a senior intelligence official in New Delhi to organise the assassination of another Sikh separatist, US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on American soil. The plot was thwarted when the hired gunman turned out to be an undercover anti-drug agent.

According to a contributor to the respected US journal Foreign Affairs, any intelligence plans to kill Pannun and Nijjar would most likely have been cleared with Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser: “He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.”

The ripples spread further. A well-regarded Indian news outlet, the Print, reports that the British government asked a senior official of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence agency reporting to the prime minister, to leave his station in London. The US also expelled a senior official with the same agency from his station in San Francisco and blocked the agency from replacing its station chief in Washington. US president Joe Biden, has since declined an invitation to be chief foreign guest at India’s big Republic Day parade on 26 January.

That kind of foreign interference, and its alleged source, was not what Australia’s government and security apparatus had in mind when they introduced controversial laws to criminalise clandestine influence-building in 2017. Their aim was to keep an eye on Australia’s Chinese-origin community, numbering about 1.2 million, and on efforts by Beijing’s spy agencies and Communist Party “united front work” operatives to manipulate its members and recruit gullible or venal figures in the wider population.

Now it appears our spooks and analysts need to worry about the possibility of India’s intelligence service working in illegal ways to further the political aims of its ruling party. They need to educate themselves about how Modi’s brand of communal politics plays out in the diaspora, and reassess the lengths to which they believe New Delhi is ready to go.

This isn’t likely to be a short-term problem either: after nearly ten years in office, polls show Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to be as popular as ever and his Congress Party–led opposition failing to gain much traction, pointing to another Modi victory in elections due early next year.

Modi’s campaign to turn India away from the secular, minority-inclusive model of its modern rebirth into a Hindu-majoritarian state is likely to get fresh impetus after that likely win. At the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, he seemed to float a name change from India to the ancient, pre-Muslim, pre-British Bharat. The new Indian parliament building, opened in April this year, includes a mural showing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and part of Afghanistan as forming Akhand Bharat (“unbroken India”), an idea pushed by the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Order), or RSS, the movement from which Modi sprang.

On 22 January, Modi will inaugurate a lavish new temple at Ayodhya to mark the legendry birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. To hundreds of millions of poorly educated Hindus, mainly in India’s north, the new Ram Birthplace Temple marks a historical truth rather than a legend. It is described as a replacement for an ancient one torn down centuries ago by a Muslim conqueror and replaced with a small mosque. That mosque was notoriously destroyed in 1992 by Hindu mobs fired up by earlier BJP leaders, initiating decades of communal strife and friction between Hindus and Muslims.

No wonder Biden didn’t want to chance standing alongside Modi four days after the new temple is opened. If he did, he might also have gazed down New Delhi’s majestic Edwin Lutyens–designed avenue — the avenue that ends in a memorial arch to the Indian dead of the British forces in the world wars — and noticed a new structure alongside, inaugurated by Modi last year. Under a stone canopy is an 8.5 metre black granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the independence fighter who rejected the non-violent campaigns of Nehru and Gandhi and aligned himself with the Axis powers. After being smuggled by Nazi agents to Germany, where he met Hitler and Himmler, Bose was delivered by U-boat to the Japanese, for whom he raised an anti-British army among Indian prisoners of war. In Modi’s eyes, Australians, the British and the Americans were on the wrong side in the Pacific war.

Although Indians have been in Australia since first British settlement, the community’s present numbers were reached by a fivefold expansion only in the last twenty years. Its social and political streams are still in formation. But pointers to emerging internal pressures can be found in British historian Edward Anderson’s important new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora.

Of an estimated thirty million worldwide, Anderson focuses on those living in Britain, making comparisons with the United States, in both cases communities that grew large a generation earlier than Australia’s. If our diaspora follows the same pattern, a Hindu identity will grow in importance over an “Indian” one, and even more than a “South Asian” one, for its members of that faith. And that identity will increasingly be flavoured by a Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) wider than religious belief and worship.

Hindutva is almost synonymous with the Hindu nationalism pursued by Modi and his BJP: a majoritarian, conservative and militant political ideology and ethno-religious movement (in Anderson’s description) that rejects pluralistic secularism and is ascendant in contemporary India.

Strangely, Hindutva also has wide support among Hindus living outside India, who simultaneously favour a chauvinistic, majoritarian ideology in India while negotiating recognition and rights in their new homes as a “model minority” noted for peaceful and prosperous integration. “Why is it that some of the most outspokenly patriotic Indians are those who have chosen to live outside of their motherland, or may have never lived in India at all?” Anderson asks.

It’s not just an assertiveness masking insecurity or guilt about leaving for a better material life, he says, but the result of decades of cultivation by Hindutva idealogues centred on the RSS. Founded in the 1920s, the RSS has nurtured generations of pracharaks (cadres) dedicated to hardening up India’s Hindu population to throw off the influence of Muslim and then British overlords.

“The life of a pracharak,” Anderson tells us, “is in many ways modelled on an ascetic: itinerant (as and when required), abstinent and unmarried, and renouncing of material possessions (receiving no salary, but provided with accommodation and vegetarian diet).” They are often from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, university-educated and English speaking, and well travelled, though they don’t mix much outside RSS circles.

Although he comes from a low caste, from where he was put into a teenage marriage (apparently unconsummated), Modi spent his early adult years as an RSS pracharak. He was then placed as the BJP’s chief minister in Gujarat, just ahead of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom there that stained his reputation and kept him barred from the United States until he became prime minister. His humble origins count as a plus for a BJP often accused of trying to keep the Hindu upper castes in charge.

The RSS began its external proselytising in the 1940s among the Indian communities in East Africa, mostly from Gujarat, which thrived as commercial intermediaries between the British and the Africans. Expelled after independence, they were able to settle in English cities, notably London, Birmingham and Leicester, by virtue of their British passports. The RSS followed them, setting up in 1966 in England as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS, an organisation that remains active today.

Living in group housing in Leicester, the pracharaks organise rank-and-file recruits, the swayamsevaks, at regular shakhas that start with a Sanskrit prayer and hoisting of the saffron-coloured flag of Hinduism, followed by marching drills and practice with bamboo staves, sessions of the Indian game kabaddi, closing prayers, and singing of the RSS anthem “Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhoomi” (Hail to Thee O Motherland).

Physical development is very much part of the ethos. The aim, Anderson says, has been “to ‘rebuild’ a population of strong Hindu male figures, largely to countenance (while simultaneously justifying) the threatening construction of the Muslim Other…” Tolerance and Gandhian non-violence have been shelved in favour of warrior models from history and legends.

“The promotion of physical training, toughness, and group unity also relates to the perception that individualism and material comforts of the West constitute a danger for Hindus,” he writes:

Second-generation Hindus overseas are considered particularly susceptible to picking up bad habits from morally bankrupt host societies, and many have discussed the “disdain” South Asian migrants have for the lax ethics of the West, its declining parental authority, licentiousness, culture of instant gratification, weakening family units, and so on. The HSS has performed a specific role in this context, providing segregated spaces for socialisation away from “corrupting influences,” in which curative “Indian” values can be transmitted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is not large: the eighty-two shakhas operating in Britain have an average weekly total attendance of 1903. They are notably more casual than those in India (where volunteers turn out in uniforms), many participants are female, and the dropout rate is high. The local volunteers often find visiting RSS cadres from India possessed of a much more hard line against Muslims than they themselves feel, or are willing to express.

Recognising this tension, the cadre-based RSS and its mass affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) have slipped into the background in recent decades, pushing forward more worldly figures to head councils claiming to speak for the one million Hindus among the 1.8 million Indian-origin residents of England and Wales. The same trend is found in the Indian diaspora of the United States, which has grown to 4.2 million from one million in 1990.

The message is also much the same, expounding the virtue of ancient Hindu theology and social organisation. All religions that began in India — Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism — are claimed to be branches of Hinduism. The theory that Hinduism itself flourished among Indo-Aryan migrants from Central Asia, imposing the caste system on darker-skinned Dravidians, is portrayed as being wrong. The real invaders were the Muslim conquerors of the last millennium. Marriage and the rearing of children are the principal roles of women. The ideal diet is vegetarianism. Homosexuality is “against nature.” Caste provides social space and closer identity, and was much more tolerant and accepted until the British raj started classifying everyone. And watch out for those young Muslim men waging a “love jihad” to seduce and convert Hindu girls.

Any criticism of these historical distortions and attendant social ills is increasingly attributed to “Hinduphobia.” In fact, Hindu councils in both Britain and the United States consciously borrow the example of Jewish organisations using charges of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. Indeed, India’s previously lukewarm, sometimes hostile relations with Israel have been transformed under Modi, who made the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 2017 and often speaks of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beyond defence and corporate interests (Modi’s favoured entrepreneur Gautam Adani runs Haifa’s port) and shared suspicion of Muslims, Modi would like to follow Netanyahu’s pathway to a state with two-tiered citizenship that gives the religious majority more rights than minorities.

Alongside this assertive victimhood, which Anderson calls a “soft” neo-Hindutva, have been occasional flare-ups of a harder version, often attributed to new arrivals from India. In 2006, a vandal forced the closure of a London exhibition of paintings by the Mumbai artist M.F. Husain, a Muslim forced into exile for his depictions of Hindu goddesses. In Leicester last year, hundreds of masked young Hindus paraded through a Muslim neighbourhood shouting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) after watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match.

Internet trolls in India and among the diaspora fire threats of murder and rape at academics who criticise Modi and Hindutva. In 2014, Wendy Doniger, an eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, came under attack by a US-based online firebrand, Rajiv Malhotra, for her book, The Hindus. Malhotra’s campaign eventually resulted in Penguin India pulping its local edition.

Although Hindu activists often accuse Muslims of living in ghettos, the Hindus in Britain are remarkably concentrated and have low rates of marrying out of their communities. Given the first-past-the-post voting system, this has made some British constituencies and their MPs captive to the Hindu vote. Periodically, British ministers invited to their functions are embarrassed when pictures circulate showing them standing next to dubious communalists visiting from India.

Where Indians were once more inclined to the Labour Party because of its warmer embrace of migrants, Hindu organisations have swung behind the Conservatives in the past decade. The diaspora’s advance into higher income brackets would have something to do with this, but the Tories are less likely to worry about human rights issues in India and have shelved a Labour initiative to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain itself. Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be more representative of the secular, US green card–holding CEO class, but he does wear his Hindu identity as a temple thread on his wrist.

Conceivably, the United States could get a president of Indian ancestry in Nikki Haley, a US-born daughter of Sikh migrants (although she converted to Christianity when she married out of the community), or a part-Indian one in Kamala Harris if she were to take over from Biden.

Australia is probably a generation off seeing an Indian-Australian close to national political leadership, though many are already at the top levels of professions and corporations. But the diaspora’s generally sunny picture is already showing some of the tensions Anderson portrays.

The RSS has a local outfit, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh Australia, running forty-nine regular shakhas with an average combined attendance of 1230 volunteers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also well established, as is a self-proclaimed umbrella body, the Hindu Council of Australia, which fits Anderson’s definition of soft neo-Hindutva. For Modi’s visit in May, a new body calling itself the Indian Australian Diaspora Foundation, which claimed to include 367 professional, caste, regional, religious, cultural and local groups as well as RSS and BJP branches, organised flights and buses for thousands of attendees at the Sydney meeting.

Hard neo-Hindutva showed up in 2019 when hecklers forced the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, set up by Kevin Rudd’s government to further bilateral relations and knowledge, to revert from public lectures to closed seminars on issues relating to Modi and Hindutva. More than a dozen India scholars severed links with the institute in protest at the decision.

Probably in response, the Albanese government announced during Modi’s visit a new body to take over the task of promoting the bilateral relationship, implicitly leaving the Australia India Institute to function as an academic think tank. The new Centre for Australia–India Relations has a banker, Swati Dave, rather than an academic as its advisory body’s chair. It will be located in Sydney’s Parramatta, a focus for the city’s Indian diaspora, whose newly elected federal MP, economist Andrew Charlton, has just written an upbeat book about the India relationship, Australia’s Pivot to India.

But there’s an important reason to think that Hindutva’s appeal might never be as great among the Indian diaspora in Australia. Our Indian population is more diverse than the British one, with Hindus barely 50 per cent of the Indian-born population and many of them drawn from India’s southern states, which are resistant to the BJP message.

As well as a large number of Christians, the diaspora also includes as many as 200,000 Sikhs, some of whom support the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan in India’s Punjab. In their meetings, Modi has ambushed Albanese with charges that these elements have vandalised Hindu temples with separatist slogans. Albanese doesn’t seem to have responded by pointing out that police suspect some of these to be “false flag” operations, or that the most violent clash so far has been an attack with bats and hammers on a Sikh group in Western Sydney in February 2021 by men recognised from a BJP–HSS rally. Or if he has, we have not been told about it.

In Sydney, as in London, New York and Texas, Indian groups opposed to Modi’s Hindutva campaigns picketed outside his mass reception. This book will help our politicians understand why. •

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
By Edward T.G. Anderson | Hurst | $57.99 | 488 pages

The post Modi’s expatriate army appeared first on Inside Story.

From the stand, Manasseh Sogavare, the Solomon Islands prime minister, looked on with relief and satisfaction. “Sports is the glue that holds the nation together,” he had told local reporters earlier. “It binds and unites us. It brings out the best of us, as individuals and collectively as a nation.” Regardless of “misinformation and shallow opinions” about the Pacific Games, “especially by a few foreign media,” Solomon Islands was united and proudly telling its games story to the world.

The games, which kicked off at that ceremony last Sunday night, have lifted the mood here after three years of turmoil and hardship. A dispute in November 2019 over Sogavare’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing led to ethnic-influenced rioting that trashed Honiara’s old Chinatown — the unrest ended, Sogavare’s government saved, by Australian troops and police flown in from Townsville. Then came Covid-19 and two years of isolation that shrank the economy by around 5 per cent.

Economic growth returned this year, but the mood was still gloomy. Along with the daily struggle for their livelihoods, people were mostly concerned about how their home provinces were doing, rather than the Solomons more widely, says veteran Honiara journalist Dorothy Wickham. “The only time you see Solomon Islanders proud of their own country is when there are things like this,” she says, referring to the games.

“I think that was one of the reasons the government wanted to go ahead,” Wickham adds. “They felt this country needed a unifying event. Even though it has come at a big cost, it was needed at this time. Especially after we’ve come through the ethnic crisis and people are fragmented.”

The cost of building facilities and hosting 5000 athletes is a big one for a country of 720,000 people with a per capita GDP of about A$3500, its deficit in trade and government spending covered largely by foreign aid and growing remittance flows from the 7000 seasonal workers now in Australia and New Zealand.

But the games have also became the focus of another competition that Solomon Islanders sum up in one word: geopolitics. China spent around A$120 million building playing courts, pools and the main stadium. While some feared that Honiara would be left with facilities unduly expensive to use and maintain, the stadium is far from grandiose — more like a typical Australian sporting club’s home ground than a grand final venue. New or improved halls of residence for visiting athletes are attached to seven colleges and schools around the city and will be a legacy for Solomon Islands students.

In the lead-up to the games, Chinese chargé d’affaires Ding Yonghua was dispatching influential Solomon Islanders off for tours of his country: all the provincial premiers for two weeks in October, a group of journalists for nine days in November. Two ambulances and four dental chairs arrived from a city in Guangzhou that has old trading links with the South Seas. In mid November, a squad of Chinese police installed metal detectors and video cameras at the games venues. Though only about fifteen-strong, their presence led to some overheated reports of Chinese police “patrolling” the city.

Big projects are being rolled out by Chinese contractors. One has just completed a new terminal and tarmac resurfacing at the airport in Munda, a tourism hub in the country’s west, which will enable direct Airbus flights from Brisbane. Huawei, the much-suspected Chinese telecommunications giant, will build 161 new mobile telephone towers funded by a A$96 million soft loan.

Not to be outdone, Australian high commissioner Rod Hilton has been in diplomatic overdrive, dispensing A$17 million in games assistance, including teams of sports medicine specialists. Together with Sogavare, he flew to Taro, the main town in the prime minister’s home province of Choiseul, to mark completion of the local airport’s hard surfacing and night-landing lights.

The Australian navy’s amphibious ship Choules arrived in early November to deliver two 4WD ambulances, vast numbers of uniforms and much other paraphernalia for the games, along with rolls of newsprint to keep Honiara’s two papers on the streets. A hundred Australian Federal Police officers flew in, on top of the fifty stationed in the Solomons since the 2019 troubles. New Zealand brought in two helicopters. The day the games opened, the US navy hospital ship Mercy arrived as part of the United States’ annual Pacific Partnership exercise, its great white bulk anchored off the city.

Australia won the VIP stakes at the opening ceremony, fielding governor-general David Hurley, who also used the opportunity to open new Australian aid projects. China came up only with Cai Dafeng, an architecture professor who is a vice-chairman of its National People’s Congress and leader of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, one of the eight tiny parties allowed in the NPC alongside the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the mission implied in his party’s name, Cai figures in the US sanctions list of officials alleged responsible for subverting Hong Kong’s limited democracy.

“The switch to China? I see some benefits in it,” Wickham says. “The best thing is the Americans have come back in, and the Australians are making more effort now. They are falling over themselves.”

Sogavare has played a hard game to fight back from his troubles of four years ago. Those troubles were driven by Daniel Suidani, then premier of Malaita, the country’s most populous island and historically the one that has sent out the most ambitious people to take advantage of the modern world.

Suidani, alone of the premiers, refused to back the switch to Beijing and cultivated continuing links to Taiwan. At one point he talked of a referendum about seceding. Sogavare’s supporters in the provincial government put up three motions of no-confidence to unseat him. The first failed. Street protests in the Malaita capital Auki prevented the second from getting to a vote. Early this year, though, the third was passed. Soon after, the central government used its supervisory powers to banish him from the provincial assembly, a move Suidani is still contesting in the courts.

While it lasted, Suidani’s defiance won support from anti-China hawks in Washington and Canberra. In a perhaps ill-judged move, the US government announced a US$25 million aid program for Malaita focused on sustainable village and forestry development. Honiara insisted such aid had to come through the central government, and when the US tried to send the funds via a civil contractor posing as a non-government organisation, the central government delayed work permits for its managers and experts.

Though some of those projects are visible in Malaita, Sogavare’s relationship with the Americans is still testy. A proposal from Washington in 2019 to resume sending Peace Corps volunteers, after a twenty-five-year absence, is still awaiting approval by Sogavare’s cabinet.

Although accusations of bribery have flown thick and fast around the votes of no-confidence that kept Sogavare in office and unseated Suidani — with sums of up to A$10,000 allegedly offered to MPs to switch sides — Ronnie Jethro Butala, the speaker of the Malaita assembly, says he saw no evidence of corruption. The explanation, he tells me, was simpler: Malaitans could see they were losing out.

“A lot of the Malaita public were getting tired of geopolitics,” he says. “No more funding was coming from the national government, and also the national government diverted all the projects from Malaita to other provinces. So it came to a stage where a lot of people said, ‘Okay, we are fed up of geopolitics, politics of different countries. We want the [provincial] government to go back to joining the [national] government so they look to ways to improve Malaita, especially with the roads and infrastructure.’”

As well as lacking development funding, Malaitans were being passed over for senior positions in the central government. Officials from the island used to be strongly represented among departmental secretaries, police commissioners and heads of authorities. Under Sogavare, preference has gone to officials from the Western and Choiseul provinces, the prime minister’s home ground. “A lot of experienced Malaitans now, most have found their way back to the village,” says Butala.

Still, Malaitans were used to being singled out and resented for their pushiness. “The black sheep within the flock,” he says. The idea of withdrawing from the Solomon Islands and going it alone isn’t dead. “My private view is that when you look at the resources in Malaita, [it] can become a very rich country if we have our independence,” he says. But a huge improvement in infrastructure would be needed first.

If the Pacific Games conclude successfully, Sogavare still faces the challenge of a severely stretched government budget and looming national elections, which have been postponed six months until next April. At sixty-eight, he is in his fourth period as prime minister and said to be anxious to finish his career with big achievements in infrastructure to bind the islands together.

The son of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Sogavare is admired for his discipline and focus. His main problem, says Wickham, is that his parliamentary supporters have little understanding of economics. “That’s his biggest downfall: he’s surrounded by politicians who just want to get rich out of the system.”

Like elections in surrounding Melanesian countries, next year’s vote  will be a contest of personalities and patronage networks. Formation of government will start only after results are declared in the country’s fifty electorates (fourteen of them in Malaita, where Suidani is forming a ticket) and MPs arrive in Honiara.

As for the geopolitics, voters will no doubt be swayed by the projects they see being built in their provinces and electorates. A good Chinese-built project would overcome the widespread antipathy this highly Christianised population feels towards China, says Wickham. “It’s like throwing a coconut into the sea — it will roll with the waves. That’s how we are reacting now.” •

The post Rolling with the waves appeared first on Inside Story.

As we walked across the village’s central playing field after church, Wea described the scene there just over thirty-five years ago: seven French military helicopters, two dozen army trucks, and some 300 French special forces and police sharpshooters ready for action. In the bush near Gossanah, nineteen Kanaks were holding twenty-three French police hostage. They had raided the island’s gendarmerie, met more resistance than expected and killed four police before decamping to a remote cave with seized weapons and their hostages.

The raid was intended to be part of a territory-wide show of force by the Melanesians in support of independence for the country they called Kanaky. Seven months earlier, in September 1987, a narrow majority of white and other settlers had voted in a referendum to remain with France. The Kanaks had boycotted the poll in the belief that the result had been preset by officially encouraged immigration in previous decades. Kanaks had occupied traditional lands in the north of the main island, a settler ambush had killed ten Kanaks, and in January 1988, a sharpshooter had killed a Kanak would-be guerilla leader holed up in a seized farmhouse.

Despite the planning, the Ouvéa rebels found themselves acting alone in April–May 1988 — and a tough reaction to the kidnapping offered France’s ambitious conservative prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a chance to boost his prospects in the looming national presidential elections.

Just three days before Chirac faced off with Socialist incumbent François Mitterrand in the second round of the election, and after half-hearted negotiations for a peaceful surrender, Chirac ordered an all-out assault on the cave. Sixteen Kanaks were killed during the attack, two executed after their capture, and their leader was allowed to die of wounds without medical attention. Two soldiers died, and all the hostages were freed.

As it turned out, Mitterrand prevailed in the election. Chirac was replaced as PM by a Socialist, Michel Rocard, who brought the shocked Kanak leader, former Catholic priest Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and the loyalist leader, businessman Jacques Lafleur, to Matignon near Paris, locked them in, and presented a plan. Putting off a vote on independence for ten years, it pledged more training and involvement for Kanaks, and more investment in rural and island lands.

Tjibaou made a unilateral decision and signed the deal. Lafleur did too. They shook hands for a photo. And so the Matignon Accord was born. A decade later, in 1998, the Nouméa Accord postponed the independence decision for another fifteen to twenty years, when it would be put to three spaced-out referendums to make sure every voter made a considered choice.

Many Kanaks — among them Charles Wea’s uncle, a former protestant pastor named Djubelly Wea — had misgivings. A strong believer in independence, Djubelly had been among Gossanah villagers detained and roughed up by French troops looking for the cave. After the troops’ assault, he and twenty-eight others were jailed for several months in Paris without trial.

When Tjibaou came to Ouvéa on the first anniversary of the cave attack to speak at the burial site of the nineteen Kanaks, Djubelly stepped forward, shouted, “Long live Kanaky! Long live independence!” then pulled out a pistol and shot dead the former priest and his deputy, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné. A bodyguard then fatally shot their assailant too.

Walking through Gossanah, Wea and I came to a small, tiered garden with walls of coral rock that turned out to be Djubelly’s grave. Back in Nouméa, his victim, Tjibaou, is venerated as a kind of Gandhi or Mandela of the Pacific, and an Oceanic cultural centre designed by Renzo Piano is named after him. I asked Charles how his uncle’s reputation stands now.

His answer shocked me. “A lot of people think he was right,” the Kanak diplomat said. “They are saying: after more than thirty years of talk, where have we got?” Shocking it might have been, but his answer chimed with the sense that the politics of New Caledonia have come in a grand circle since 1987, with an increasing risk of an explosion like the Ouvéa cave drama.

When the time came for the series of three independence referendums promised in the Nouméa Accord, the French government was back in the hands of a conservative president, Emmanuel Macron. Like his predecessors, left and right, Macron was against giving the Kanaks any more voting weight than other French citizens, though the accord had “frozen” the electoral roll at 1998 to keep out later immigrants.

In the first referendum, in 2018, the vote for independence was 43 per cent. By the second, in 2020, it had grown to 47 per cent. The third vote was looming as a close-run thing at the end of 2021. Then, in September that year, Covid-19’s Delta variant swept through New Caledonia, quickly infecting over 13,000 of its 270,000 people. More than 280 of them died, about 60 per cent of them Kanaks.

With its communities having embarked on the customary year of mourning, the Kanak parties begged for the referendum to be postponed for a year. Quarantine restrictions limited movement, adding to the disadvantages faced by Kanak parties campaigning with village meetings while the urbanised loyalists could rely on the internet.

Macron, for his part, was facing his first re-election test in April 2022. His competition came from the further right, notably Marine Le Pen. He needed a boost for French national pride, especially after Scott Morrison delivered his humiliating submarine decision in September 2021.

When he and territories minister Sébastien Lecornu insisted the New Caledonia vote go ahead, the Kanak parties decided on a boycott. Participation fell from around 86 per cent in the earlier two independence votes to 43.9 per cent, with the non-voters concentrated in Kanak regions. Of those who voted, 96.5 per cent chose No and only 3.5 per cent Yes.

The result was immediately declared “null and void” by the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a forum of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Islands Forum — a wider regional grouping that includes Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian states as well as Australia and New Zealand — was more diplomatic: the boycott needed to be considered in “the contextual consideration and analysis of the result.”

Unfazed, Macron declared that “France is more beautiful because New Caledonia decided to stay.” Local opponents of independence were also jubilant. “Tonight we are French and we will stay that way. It’s no longer negotiable,” said fervent loyalist Sonia Backès, president of the Southern Province region. To her, the Nouméa Accord was defunct, allowing the electoral rolls to be thrown open to more recent arrivals and special economic support for Kanak-dominated regions to be wound up.

Macron echoed these sentiments when he visited New Caledonia in July this year accompanied by a squadron of Rafale fighters and their air refuellers and transports designed to demonstrate France’s ability to swing military power into the Pacific. New Caledonia was French because it had chosen to be French in three referendums, he told a crowd of 10,000 tricolour-waving Europeans and Polynesians in Nouméa’s Place des Cocotiers.

Now the next stage of economic development could begin, he said, transforming locally mined nickel into a low-cost green-energy industry and expanding agriculture. The voice of France would resonate across the Indo-Pacific, boosted by a new military academy in the territory for the region’s armed forces. “If independence is to choose tomorrow to have a Chinese base, here, or be dependent on other fleets, good luck!” he declared.

On the political future, he invited loyalists and independence parties to a trilateral dialogue, mentioning more than once that the freeze on the electoral roll had always been “transitional” and had led to “exclusions and frustrations.” He had already inducted Backès into government as a junior minister, responsible for citizenship.

Macron then travelled on to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, where he declared France was an “enhancer of sovereignty” for Pacific island nations, helping protect them against a “new imperialism.” The ironies were not lost on his audiences.

Kanak and loyalist parties were back in Paris for those talks last month, and will continue negotiating in Nouméa later this month. In Paris, Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, now presiding over a minority government, put forward what was described, strangely, as a document martyr, a paper to be chewed over and torn apart before taking any final form.

On the critical question of electoral eligibility, the new external territories minister, Gérald Darmanin, revealed voters in territorial and regional elections would need to have been born in New Caledonia or resident for ten years. Whether or not the pro-independence alliance, FLNKS, agreed, the electoral roll would be “unfrozen” in this way before provincial elections due by May 2024.

Questions of self-determination, meanwhile, would be deferred for at least “two generations” from a new accord, Darmanin said — probably about sixty years. “There is no longer a sword of Damocles,” he added, although only the loyalists had felt thus threatened.

Aside from the backlash among Melanesian countries, Macron’s decision is seen as folly by some seasoned observers in New Caledonia, and appears likely to raise tensions and threaten unrest. Mathias Chauchat, a public law professor at the University of New Caledonia, says Macron is being likened to Bonaparte, who listened to no advice, even from his own ambassadors. “The French politicians are living in the past, in the 1960s,” he tells me. “I don’t understand it. It’s crazy. France is not a modern state like the other democracies.”

Others I spoke to wondered if the Kanak leadership would have the stomach to abandon their comfortable positions, as Macron is gambling they won’t. But being ousted after the electoral roll changes could harden their attitude. A return to violent protest was likely, and could happen without much warning. Chauchat shares those fears. “If you lose the majority, you have to go on the street, the terrain,” he says. “It would lead to unrest.”

I recount the remark Charles Wea had made at his uncle’s grave to Patrice Godin, a social anthropologist who has studied and lived among the Kanaks for decades. For Godin, Wea’s remark reinforces the risks of changing the electoral system to make any real decolonisation unimaginable for a long time.

“When political negotiations fail, it is not the most open and moderate leaders who prevail, but the most radical,” says Godin. “One wonders whether the French government is aware of this. I am currently sensing great concern among Kanak elected representatives and political decision-makers. If they fail to change the government’s policy, they know that their activists, their voters and the majority of the Kanak population will withdraw their support.”

These leaders are already facing a great deal of criticism, he adds. “If the government doesn’t listen to them, it will contribute to the rise of a new generation of Kanak politicians who will be less conciliatory than those they are discussing with today. This may take time, but it is inevitable. Kanak demands are too far advanced for the movement to die out.”

True, Godin says, the thirty-five years since the Matignon Accord have changed the Kanak people and their way of life, producing more graduates, managers and intellectuals. “But this evolution has in no way altered the Kanak desire for decolonisation. Quite the contrary, as shown by the results of the three referendum consultations on the way out of the Nouméa Accord. We might even say that this desire is more considered and it is a result of the changes that have taken place.”

The nationalist idea has matured to the point where the Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa and some other Kanak leaders are talking of “interdependence” with France following a transfer of sovereignty, an arrangement that recalls the pacts of free association the Cook Islands have with New Zealand or the Marianas with the United States.

While full independence was “false gold” for the Kanak parties, “it’s very difficult for them to ask for an associated state because they think France will lie to them,” Chauchat says. “There is no trust between the current French government and the Kanaks. If you want an agreement, you need trust first.”

Such an idea was proposed by Mitterrand’s high commissioner in Nouméa, Edgard Pisani, during the 1987–88 troubles, and would achieve decolonisation while maintaining French military bases. (The Kanak parties have no interest in building their own military.) But the option has since been studiously ignored by Paris, perhaps because it might win local support.

“There is no other solution, and definitely no solution in France,” says Chauchat, adding: “France never honours its words. It has always failed in its decolonisation processes… It will end in tragedy like everywhere.” The best option now for the Kanaks is to prevent the opening up of the electoral roll and keep the dream of independence alive, he says. “We have to wait.”

Macron still needs to persuade New Caledonia’s parties to agree to his new plan, and then his minority government must win a 60 per cent vote of approval from a joint sitting of the national assembly and senate to amend the French constitution, into which the Nouméa Accord is written. He is hoping his show of French force against China will win regional sympathy, which seems unlikely. The island states have no particular liking for China, but they will take its money and projects, and they will use its perceived threat to get more out of the other powers.

“If, as President Macron claims, France’s project is to contribute to the creation of an Indo-Pacific axis to stem Chinese expansion in the region, it will have to be admitted into the club of states of the region,” Godin says. “For the moment, this is proving difficult. The small island states see France as it is in the region, one of the last old-style colonial powers. All these countries are in favour of New Caledonian independence, and more or less openly support Kanak nationalist claims.”

France lacks the resources for a region-wide aid and development effort. And the United States and its allies need the support of the island states against Chinese coercion. “From this point of view, France is more of a pebble in their shoe than a reliable and legitimate ally,” says Godin. “By clinging to the last shreds of its colonial past, France is in fact a cumbersome ally.”

Still, Macron’s ambition, recalling Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, has its fans. Many Australians sympathise with Macron over the submarine affair and appreciate the way he called out Morrison as a liar. Richard Marles, the defence minister, is said to have struck a rapport with his French counterpart, Sébastien Lecornu, the same man who as territories minister helped push through the third referendum in New Caledonia. Marles is due in Nouméa in December for a gathering of Pacific defence ministers hosted by Lecornu.

Potentially complicating Australia’s approach was foreign minister Penny Wong’s appointment in March of Australia’s first ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed. The ambassador’s office, she said, “enables deep engagement with many of our closest partners including the Pacific family” and embeds Indigenous perspectives in Australian foreign policy.

Yet when she visited New Caledonia in April, Wong failed to acknowledge that the Kanaks — who were the first to settle its islands some 3000 years ago and now make up 42 per cent of the population (with Europeans accounting for 24 per cent, according to the most recent census, in 2019) — should be accorded a special right of decolonisation. “Institutional arrangements in New Caledonia are a matter for the people of New Caledonia and the French state,” was as far as she went, while repeatedly praising the French contribution to “security and prosperity in the Pacific.”

Of course, if Wong does want to raise the First Nations angle at some point — always difficult given Australia’s history — a No majority in our own referendum this month won’t help.

Meanwhile, though, pro-French loyalists are losing ground overall in the Pacific. In French Polynesia, the independence party led by veteran nuclear-testing opponent Oscar Temaru has won a majority in the assembly and now leads an autonomous government. In New Caledonia, a Kanak has just won a seat in the French senate for the first time after a vote-swapping deal with a dissident loyalist who beat Backès for the other seat. Every year recently, about 2000 white residents pack up and leave, gradually shifting the demographics, and métissage (intermarriage) between Kanaks and Polynesian migrants is on the rise.

Bonapartist or Gaullist, Macron is unheeding. His policies could well be driving New Caledonia back to the tense days of the 1980s, a condition of civil war. Younger Kanaks may see violence as a way of speeding up the French exodus. “Emmanuel Macron seems to be blinded by his ambitions for France and to understand nothing of what is happening today in New Caledonia and in the Pacific,” says Patrice Godin. “I still want to believe that it’s not too late to wake up.” •

The post France’s stubborn grip appeared first on Inside Story.

Ahead of an American presidential election that might return to power an isolationist and avowed admirer of dictators, Australian national security insiders have been assured during their regular “leadership dialogue” with their American counterparts that, yes, protection and patronage remain. But whether or not Donald Trump returns, says Lowy Institute analyst Sam Roggeveen, the Americans will inevitably pull back from trying to maintain strategic primacy in the Western Pacific.

Eventually, Roggeveen argues in his important new book The Echidna Strategy, the Americans will come to terms with a power balance involving its adversaries — China, North Korea and Russia — facing off against strong friends like Japan, South Korea and Australia, with independent emerging powers Indonesia and India in the middle.

Roggeveen doesn’t envisage a sudden US withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific. But Australia will gradually lose great-power protection, forcing it to take a more independent path. “There won’t be a principled declaration of independence, but a hesitant and gradual process of separation triggered by America’s declining interest and motivation to protect Australia.”

Since this shift could conceivably happen over the first half of this century — during the next twenty-five or so years, that is — he believes it should be influencing the defence investments and foreign policy decisions we are making right now. Instead of placing a “big bet” on the United States remaining dominant, and acquiring nuclear submarines to assist, Australia should adopt a version of the porcupine strategy — by promising to inflict too much pain on the aggressor to justify any gains they may anticipate — for its own defence and go all out to keep Indonesia on side and help build its strength.

In a little over 200 pages of elegant logic, Roggeveen, who has led the security team at Lowy for the last fifteen years and before that worked in the Office of National Assessments, delivers a broadside at Canberra’s bipartisan consensus on the AUKUS agreement. He adds to the case made by figures like James Curran, historian and Australian Financial Review international editor, that the agreement still hasn’t been explained — and probably can’t be, except as a political fix.

As former ONA head Peter Varghese says, Roggeveen’s book “defies the echo chamber of current strategic policy” — the chamber that takes in the two main parties, the defence and foreign affairs departments, ONA’s successor the Office of National Intelligence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the ANU National Security College, and a federal press gallery captivated by gee-whiz weaponry and China panics.

Roggeveen builds on the thinking of strategic analysts Hugh White and the late Allan Gyngell, who could see an era of power contestation developing in Asia. Far from “appeasement” — the cheap slur thrown by junior minister Pat Conroy at Labor’s national conference last week — they urge a bristly defence of Australia and its approaches combined with efforts to avoid being roadkill if the big vehicles start moving.

Roggeveen looks first at America’s national will. So far, the cost of its post-1945 security presence in Asia has been manageable and the risks low. But China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weaponry are changing the calculus. “When it comes to taking on China, the costs are too high and the stakes too low,” Roggeveen says.

The United States is uniquely secure, he points out, buffered by wide oceans east and west, and by benign neighbours north and south. It has the world’s largest military, its largest nuclear arsenal, and a young and growing population. With foreign trade only 23 per cent of its GDP, it can be economically self-sufficient.

“When Donald Trump said what was previously unsayable for a US president — that America’s allies are free-riders, that NATO had passed its use-by date, and that America gains nothing from its forward military presence in East Asia — the response from the US security establishment was swift and predictable,” Roggeveen writes. “America’s alliances, they said, are the backbone of global security.”

But Trump had grasped an important point. “America’s alliances are not a service the US offers to its allies and the world. Ultimately, they need to make the United States safer. If America’s alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia cease to have any benefit for the US, then it will stop making sacrifices for them.”

Cold war justifications for alliances are crumbling. East Asian allies are starting to question the “extended deterrence” of US nuclear forces and thinking about acquiring their own. “The US has learned to live with French, British and Israeli nuclear weapons. It can do the same for South Korea and Japan,” Roggeveen says.

And unlike Washington’s old enemy, the Soviet Union, China lacks an exportable ideology. “Communism in China is little more than a series of slogans (such as the ‘China dream’ and a ‘community of common destiny’). To be a communist in China today is to be committed not to the global spread of Marxist-Leninist ideology but simply to the preservation of Communist Party rule at home.”

Realistically, no nation of China’s economic weight would ever be content for its rival to be the leading strategic power in its own region, “any more than the US would tolerate China being the leading strategic power in North and Latin America. Imagine tens of thousands of Chinese troops based in Canada, an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in Cuba, and Chinese spy planes routinely patrolling just off the US east coast, and you get the idea.”

Should Trump be re-elected, or a “Trump-like figure” take the Republican Party back into the White House, his agenda would return, and probably with less institutional resistance. Trump might have been unexpected but he isn’t anomalous, says Roggeveen. His rise injected a new uncertainty into Australia’s strategic future.

The result will be “a long sunset of American power in Asia, in which China emerges as the leading nation but not the dominant one.” Australia’s alliance with the United States won’t be formally abrogated or repealed: too many people in both countries have a stake in its preservation.

“The treaty will remain,” says Roggeveen. “So will the troops, and the joint exercises, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements, and the arms sales. What will erode is the credibility of the alliance. Australia and the region in general will simply stop believing that the alliance represents an implicit promise that the two countries will fight on each other’s behalf.”

Yet Australia is doubling its bet on the United States staying on top. The planned eight nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs, more than the British or French navies possess, will operate as a one-eighth addition to the US navy’s SSN force. Aside from being able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with a 1500 to 2000 kilometre range, their role will be to find and chase China’s ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs.

For nuclear powers, such SSBNs are the guaranteed “second strike” capability against a successful “first strike.” Roggeveen could have said more about the fact that China has only six SSBNs, five operating from a base in Hainan island facing the South China Sea and one near Qingdao in the Yellow Sea. Maintenance and training mean that only one or two are likely to be on patrol at any time. The relentless “freedom of navigation” patrols in these waters by US and allied forces seem designed to stop those SSBNs slipping out into the open ocean, from where more of the continental United States would be in missile range. Or perhaps they are poised to destroy the subs before they can launch. Either way, are we out to remove this stabilising element of mutual assured destruction?

This is a case of capability determining defence policy rather than the other way round, Roggeveen says: “Once we have the capability to send a fleet of boats thousands of kilometres to our north around China’s coast, and the capability to fire missiles at the Chinese mainland, we are going to have to come up with reasons why we are choosing to withhold that capability in the event of war.” Equally worryingly, “by the time this question arises Australia will have been enculturated and integrated with the US Navy over decades. It is too much to expect that our leaders would turn their backs on all that in the decisive moment.”

Any sense that the United States might have to compel Australia into helping in a future conflict is contradicted by the continuing willingness of both major political parties to lock military planning into US thinking. As Roggeveen puts it, the AUKUS agreement shows that “Australia didn’t need to be talked into anything.” And from an American perspective, what’s not to like when Australia comes offering to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for US weapons?

All the costs of AUKUS weaponry will be carried by Australia, with no hard promises in return. “It is a project of vaulting ambition that is out of step with Australian tradition as a military middle power, wildly at odds with our international status and, most importantly, a wasteful expenditure of public money that will make Australia less safe,” Roggeveen says. “But having cancelled the French project and inaugurated AUKUS, Australia is now proposing to manage not two but three submarine designs. The Collins upgrade is still going ahead, and we are adding two nuclear-powered designs as well, a technology with which Australia has no experience. It will surely shock no one if this initiative fails entirely, or is severely cut back over time.”

Meanwhile, Canberra’s advocates of more defence spending are vague about what exactly Australia needs to defend itself against. At the same time, they assume that China is or will be so powerful that resisting it without US help is pointless.

Waging war on Australia wouldn’t be easy, says Roggeveen, and Australia can relatively cheaply raise the stakes even further. “Australia’s security commentators project their anxieties about Australia, their lack of confidence in it, onto China. They think we can’t manage the challenge of China alone because we’re not strong or mature enough. I say we are, and I say we can.”

The invasion scenario put up by defence hawks like late army general and Liberal senator Jim Molan are laughably implausible. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to defend ourselves against invasion,” says Roggeveen. “[T]his will remain beyond the capabilities of any rival military force for the indefinite future, and even if it becomes achievable, it will remain unnecessary and even counterproductive for the aggressor.” The only plausible reason to attack Australia would be to strike facilities being used to attack China — the US strategic bombers at the Katherine air base, for instance, and the SSNs at the Fremantle naval base.

Instead, Australia should rely on distance to put huge restraints on any Chinese military action. “Put simply, distance is Australia’s single biggest defence asset,” Roggeveen says, reminding his readers that Beijing is closer to London than to Sydney. That distance is invariably played down in the Australian defence debate in favour of a view that Australia is on the front line of military competition with China, or on China’s doorstep.

Australia should invest in forces that can punish and repel any antagonist who comes close — an antagonist gaining a military base in the Pacific islands, for example — but not attempt to project power any further. In other words, no capabilities aimed explicitly at hitting Chinese territory. Submarines, yes, long-range air power, yes, some missiles, yes, a lot of troops for restoring peace or providing disaster relief in the region, yes — but no heavily armoured army. Backing these capabilities would be hardened military bases, stockpiles of fuel and strategic materials, and deeper protection against cyberattack and other “grey” threats.

This is the “echidna strategy” of the book’s title — a version of which Roggeveen suggests for the defence of Taiwan. (He doesn’t favour a simple surrender of this democracy, and perhaps could have made this clearer.) It is essentially a strategy of denial.

“[This means] we are essentially planning to inflict the bare minimum damage on China so that we can persuade Beijing to stop but not give it a reason to hit us even harder,” Roggeveen says. It may not be heroic, “but such is the lot of a middle power when facing a great power. The alternative, which we are now pursuing, is a defence strategy which incentivises China to pay more military attention to us.”

Roggeveen does explore the ultimate defensive spike — nuclear weapons for Australia — but concludes that as nuclear weapons haven’t been used against non-nuclear adversaries since 1945, the chances of China raising the stakes that far against a much smaller, distant power are slim enough to discount.

But this doesn’t mean Australia should withdraw into a ball like a threatened echidna. It should be ambitious, but by using diplomacy and defence support. The focus should be Indonesia, the only emerging big power in the most contestable region around China capable of pushing back against the Chinese. “All the threat inflation, all the fever dreams conjured by our security pundits about China’s military threat to Australia — we are at risk of being surrounded; there is danger on our doorstep — would suddenly become real if Indonesia was ever hostile towards Australia.”

Then there is preserving Australia’s sphere of influence in the Pacific by doing more: more aid, more infrastructure, more investment, more labour mobility, more diplomacy and more defence cooperation. Though the smaller nations might be reluctant to surrender their China leverage, a European Union–style economic and political pact could cement island relations with Australia and New Zealand, with free trade, open borders, shared services, a regional airline and perhaps even a regional bank with a single currency.

This initiative could build on Roggeveen’s argument for a doubling of the Australian population to create a bigger economic base. With Papua New Guinea’s population now put tentatively at 11.8 million, and another three million or so in the other Pacific island nations, the region is there for us all to bulk up.

Roggeveen also puts the case for strong regional organisations. Not the Quad so much — its members are too dispersed, too divergent and too invested in China to agree to a NATO-style common defence, or even to explicitly mention China — but the much-derided Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its appendages. Instead of being disappointed about what ASEAN fails to do, we should look at what it’s been able to prevent — namely, wars between its members.

The Albanese government might sincerely believe in AUKUS, or it might be using it to help gain time in office in the expectation it will collapse on someone else’s watch. Either way, this book from such a seasoned and centrally placed figure in the defence and foreign policy sphere shows that our national future is being decided in panic and haste. •

The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace
By Sam Roggeveen | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $32.99 | 232 pages

The post Spiky questions about the US alliance appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the US-supported president Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the economy has shrunk by 20 per cent or more. Around twenty million people are short of food, and an estimated 3.2 million children are malnourished. Some rural people are reportedly selling organs or even children for cash to survive. Others have streamed into relief camps near provincial capitals for meagre rations.

For its part, the Taliban leadership seems less focused on dealing with this crisis than applying its interpretation of sharia law to social behaviour. It bears down chiefly on women and girls, restricting or even stopping their access to work and education or movement outside the home.

Behaviour like this is the reason the world hangs back from helping the country recover from war. Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran and Qatar have kept their embassies running in Kabul, and India rejoined them in August last year. But none of those countries has formally recognised the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, and nor has any other Muslim-majority country. Australia and other Western countries maintain cautious communication with the Taliban through diplomatic posts in Qatar, and in the United States’ case through occasional fly-ins or third-country meetings.

Around US$9 billion of the former regime’s foreign funds have been frozen by the United States, several European countries and the United Arab Emirates. After seventy top economists, including Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, urged president Joe Biden last August to let the Afghan central bank tap the reserves — and stop the “collective punishment” of the Afghan people — the United States set up a foundation in Switzerland to allocate half of the reserves in American banks (US$3.5 billion) to pay for humanitarian supplies and electricity from Central Asian neighbours.

But what more can and should the outside world do to alleviate the suffering and starvation of the Afghan people — and beyond that, influence the Taliban towards the more inclusive interpretations of Islam, especially in the treatment of women and religious minorities, that apply in so many other Muslim nations?

In The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left Pakistani-American scholar Hassan Abbas suggests that the immediate prospects for reform in Afghanistan are not great, but that the West must try anyway.

He opens his book by describing how contact between the Taliban and the United States in Qatar from 2012 first acquainted Western officials with some of the figures who were destined to emerge in top positions in the new emirate. After Donald Trump became president in early 2017, this contact developed into negotiations for a US withdrawal.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat of Afghan origin, was appointed leader of the American team, and in January 2019 he was cleared by secretary of state Mike Pompeo to offer a drawdown of US forces to zero. In July that year, Trump imposed a nine-month deadline for an agreement. With no gains to show from pulling out of the Iran nuclear pact and talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump needed a deal before the 2020 election.

The Taliban persuaded the Americans to agree on a complete pull-out, including from the huge Bagram air base near Kabul. In return they promised that Afghanistan would not become a base for terrorist attacks on the United States or its allies, and that US forces and their local helpers could withdraw without harassment. Rather less firmly, they also pledged to enter power-sharing dialogue with Ashraf Ghani, and to look after Shia and Hazara minorities and allow female education.

Trump got his peace deal in February 2020, though it was signed in Doha rather than, as he’d hoped, at Camp David near Washington. He overruled Ghani’s objection to the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners as part of the deal. With withdrawal by May 2021 pledged, the Taliban suspended action against American forces and concentrated instead on attacking Kabul’s army. By the time Biden formed his administration, Taliban fighters controlled most of the provinces and were closing in on Kabul. Ghani dithered and postured, losing any opportunity to bargain.

Biden decided not to abandon Trump’s agreement, though he shifted the final departure date to 11 September 2021, exactly two decades after the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan-based al Qaeda. After a trillion dollars, 2448 Americans killed, 20,722 wounded and many more traumatised, Biden said, a changed outcome was highly unlikely even if America stayed another hundred years.

The reality, says Abbas, is that “the Taliban outlasted the Americans.” Afghans were disabused of any faith that the West and their favoured Kabul politicians would save them. “The glorious myth of the ability of foreign intervention to install a democratic order” was comprehensively debunked.

Parallel with the negotiations in Doha, the Taliban were undergoing successive leadership changes. In tracking these shifts, Abbas give us important insight into the make-up and views of the men now in charge of Afghanistan.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive but charismatic Ameer ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful) during the Taliban’s first spell of government in the 1990s, resurrected the movement after it was ousted by the Americans and the Northern Alliance in late 2001. Around 1995, he had boldly entered a museum in Kandahar, the country’s second city, taken out a rarely seen cloak said to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad, and put it on before an amazed and adoring crowd.

In 2013, a little over a decade into the new insurgency, Omar became ill and died in a Karachi hospital. His death was kept secret by the Taliban and their mentors in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, while succession plans proceeded. The natural successor might have been Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Omar’s young brother-in-law, but he was viewed with suspicion by the ISI because he’d opened contact with a brother of Mohammed Karzai, the then US-backed president in Kabul. He was also out of the picture: the ISI had arrested and jailed him in 2010.

In his absence, Mullah Akhtar Mansour was proclaimed the new emir in 2015. A mullah though he was, he was known for his worldly appetites, heading frequently to the Gulf to “buy perfume” — in other words, enjoy Russian sex workers — and hosting Gulf sheikhs for falcon-hunting. It was under his leadership that the Taliban made their first breakthrough in Afghanistan’s north, seizing the city of Kunduz.

Mansour’s term as emir ended when an American drone strike killed him on the road back to Quetta, his Pakistani hideout, after a stay in Iran. The ISI helped target him, Abbas says, so that US forces struck him on the road, rather than at a tea-stand halt, to avoid civilian casualties. With this “help” from the ISI the United States may have lost an emir more inclined to deal with Kabul.

Succession came down to one of Mansour’s two appointed deputies. The victor, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, then fifty-five, was one of the few mullahs who actually knew the Qur’an and hadiths (sayings of the Prophet), though his interpretations diverged from those of most Muslims elsewhere. Apparently strict and calm, Abbas reports, even now he doesn’t know how to use a mobile phone.

Hibatullah retained Mansour’s other deputy, Sirajuddin (or Siraj) Haqqani, a military commander regarded by US intelligence as an ISI asset, who to this day has a US$10 million bounty on his head. One of Omar’s sons, twenty-six-year-old Mullah Yaqoob, was added as second deputy. Baradar, added as a third deputy in 2018 after his release by the Pakistanis at Washington’s request, was soon assigned to the Doha negotiations.

Two years after its return to Kabul, the new Taliban emirate has two centres of power. Hibatullah resides in Kandahar, surrounded by equally conservative mullahs in a council known as the Rahbari Shura. This is the ultimate power centre, akin to the supreme theocratic figure in Iran.

The other centre is the government in Kabul. Unlike its counterpart in Tehran, it isn’t the product of any form of popular election. Its most powerful figures are Siraj Haqqani and Yaqoob, who seized the interior and defence ministries respectively in August 2021 and remain entrenched there.

The prime ministership went to a seventy-year-old mullah, Mohammad Hassan Akhund, regarded as safe hands by Hibatullah. The important qualifications for the job, according to Abbas, were being in Pakistan’s good books, having been in the Taliban councils in Peshawar or Quetta shura and, having studied at the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, being of like mind with Hibatullah.

Akhund heads a cabinet of mostly Pushtun conservatives, nearly half of whom are on a UN terrorism blacklist. His government did become a little more diverse when deputy ministers were added, notably deputy economics minister Abdul Latif Nazari, a member of the Hazara ethnic minority who holds a PhD in political science, and deputy health minister Hassan Ghyasi, a medical doctor who is also Hazara.

From the time of the Doha peace agreement until their first weeks after entering Kabul, the Taliban purported to have changed since the 1990s, when women were forced into the all-enveloping burqa, and executions and amputations conducted in public were substituted for sport. Siraj Haqqani even told readers of the New York Times in February 2020 that “killing and maiming must stop,” that the Taliban would work for a new inclusive political system, and that women would have the “right to work” and the “right to education.”

There have been glimmers of progress since the takeover. Taliban fighters guard the Shia minority’s mosques and festivals. Women in the cities wear headscarves, as they would anyway, rather than the burqa, and women have been appointed heads of maternity hospitals and gynaecological schools. A contest to head the Afghan Cricket Board became a “fistfight,” suggesting that attitudes towards sport had changed from when the first Taliban regime expelled the Pakistan soccer team with shaven heads for wearing shorts on the field. Hibatullah has also issued a fatwa against forced marriage and the disinheritance of widows.

Mobile phones and social media are allowed. Indeed, Taliban spokesmen have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. With seven million Afghans using the internet — “a necessity of the people,” one minister has said — the regime accepts that this particular tide of modernity can’t be ordered back. A new 100,000-strong regular army and a 140,000-strong police force, many with shaven faces, have been formed. Foreign correspondents are allowed to stay in Kabul, and often get interviews with government figures.

Yet if the promises on taking Kabul seemed too good to be true, that’s because they were, according to Abbas. In December 2021 women were told they must be accompanied by a male relative when travelling medium to long distances. Girls’ schools for grade six (age eleven) and above were subsequently closed.

In June last year, a book by chief justice Mullah Abdul Hakim (with a foreword by ) emphasised the absolute authority of the emir, and entertains no notion of a representative mechanism. Modern (non-religious) education was causing all the country’s problems, he wrote, so education had to be inherently religious. Women could only be wives and mothers, and their intellectual inferiority meant they could never be the emir. They had to be taught at home by family members, and must never study alongside men; if they had to leave the house, the teacher must be a woman.

In October, a government guidance said girls shouldn’t take college entrance exams for subjects like economics, engineering, agriculture, geology and journalism, which were deemed “too difficult.”

Abbas sees two minds at war here, with the conservative clerics advising so far prevailing, to the dismay of more progressive elements. It doesn’t help that some Western media call this “a return to traditional Islam” — it isn’t, he says. The Taliban “routinely mix up their tribal norms with Islam” instead of following sayings of the Prophet such as “Education is incumbent on every boy and girl.” Once again, women are the victims of war, Abbas writes. “They have become the bargaining chip, their liberties the sacrifice.”

And what of the Taliban’s other promises?

On security, the main terror threat comes from the regional branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State in Khorasan. Its suicide bombing amid the crowds outside Kabul’s airport on 26 August 2021 killed 170 Afghans and thirteen American soldiers, and it has also targeted the Shia and Hazara minorities where it can. The Taliban are said to be seeking aid from the Americans, including signals intelligence, to fight the ISK; outflanked in extremism, it worries that its now-idle fighters might gravitate to the radical group.

But old Taliban friendships persist. In July last year, a CIA drone strike killed the visiting al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul residence where he was apparently a guest of interior minister Siraj Haqqani. The muted response of the government showed its embarrassment.

While the ISK, with its many foreign members, might struggle in Afghanistan, a worsening security problem is blowing back on the Taliban’s old puppet-masters in Pakistan. A wave of terror bombings by the Taliban’s counterpart, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, is aiming to establish an even purer (to its mind) form of Islamic rule in the country whose name means “Land of the Pure.”

As for inclusion, the Taliban resisted bringing figures from the former US-backed government into even symbolic roles. But Hamid Karzai, the former president, and Abdullah Abdullah, a former chief minister, continue to live in Kabul. The Hazara ethnic minority fares better than during the first Taliban period, when they were victims of a genocide that saw desperate journeys to foreign asylum — some to Australia by boat — but Abbas notes Hazara lands reportedly being taken by Pashtuns and Hazara being excluded from relief supplies.

Economic stringency is affecting the Taliban as well, and helping moderate figures. Baradar has come back into the picture as head of economic policy with oversight of the finance ministry. Though not an economist, his Doha background makes him best suited to approach foreign partners and donors.

Another frontman is a foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, who grew up in New Zealand, speaks fluent English and may be a son-in-law of the late emir Mansour. As part of this effort to improve their image abroad, the Taliban have invited foreign correspondents to witness the drive against opium cultivation.

Overall, Abbas says it’s too early to declare that anything resembling a “New Taliban” has arrived. The regime is a toxic mix of “religion gone sour,” patriarchy, tribalism, nationalism and ethnic rivalry — all surrounded by baleful geopolitical rivalries: Saudi Arabia vs Turkey vs Iran; India vs Pakistan; the United Arab Emirates vs Qatar. But change might happen over the next five years as the Omar-era old guard retires.

This is very much an interim book, breezily written, more journalistic than academic, with necessarily vague attributions to the Taliban, diplomatic, intelligence and army figures whom Abbas quotes. It is strong on the who, how and where, less so on the “why.” The explanation of the Taliban’s theology derived from the Deoband school in Northern India could be a lot clearer: Abbas assumes a knowledge of the Salafi and Wahhabi purist schools originating in the Arab world in making a distinction about the Taliban.

But Abbas does buttress his contention that holding back doesn’t help anyone. The Taliban are the de facto government, and the West recognises regimes with equally atrocious human rights records elsewhere. Distinguishing between engagement and endorsement, Abbas argues that only through “creative engagement” can the Taliban be influenced effectively. He concludes: “Not engaging is going to support the view of hardliners that the world is against them — and consequently they will rise further within the organisation.” •

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left
By Hassan Abbas | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 305 pages

The post Enigmatic pariah appeared first on Inside Story.

US president Joe Biden had rushed back to Washington from the G7 summit in Hiroshima to negotiate a debt-ceiling deal with Congress. Otherwise he would have joined Modi, Albanese and Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida in Sydney for a meeting of the Quad, that relatively new grouping seen in American and Australian circles as a way of countering the two Asian countries’ diffidence about lining up against China. (Japan’s diffidence reflects its post-1945 constitution’s bar on non-defensive use of force, India’s its longstanding non-alignment doctrine.)

But what if the Quad instead became a forum for Japan and India to enlist Australia’s help in persuading Washington to give China some space? Just such a proposal is put forward in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads: A Japanese Strategy for Peace and Sustainable Prosperity,” a paper published in Tokyo at the end of July.

The paper comes not from familiar members of Japan’s left but from Japanese scholars and a South Korean co-author who mostly gained their doctorates in the United States. The two lead authors, Mike Mochizuki and Kuniko Ashizawa, are professors at George Washington University in the American capital.

In essence, the paper argues that Japan should lead a “middle power” effort to lower tensions in Asia. “As part of its middle power diplomacy,” the scholars write, “Japan could also build on the Quad… and take the lead in promoting a ‘middle power coalition’ among Japan, Australia, and India, and thus lead the agenda-setting of the Quad.”

The coalition could then be extended to include other middle powers in the region, including South Korea and the ASEAN countries: “In this process, it would be effective to envision a ‘middle power quad’ by inviting South Korea to join the Japan–Australia–India coalition. By building on its partnerships with middle powers in Asia and in Europe, Japan should vigorously engage China to stabilise bilateral relations as well as to cooperate on pressing transnational challenges.”

The paper’s critique and proposals may upset comfortable assumptions in Washington and Canberra. “Rather [than] being solely dependent on the United States,” it says, “Japan needs a more autonomous foreign policy — what might be called a ‘pro-American, autonomous diplomacy.’” Instead of being “self-righteous” about values-oriented foreign policy, Japan should respect political diversity and promote peaceful coexistence, resisting efforts to divide Asia into a struggle between democracies and autocracies.

This vision is offered as a counterpoint to the concept of the “Indo-Pacific” — a formulation developed by Canberra pundits and adopted by the United States — which “diminishes the importance of continental Asia and suggests a regional orientation designed to counter and even contain China.”

The authors see the National Security Strategy announced by Prime Minister Kishida in December as a “180-degree turnaround” from longstanding Japanese defence policy. It included a doubling of defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP and an arsenal of new Tomahawk cruise missiles designed to strike back at China and North Korea. Commenting on the counterstrike capabilities of the missiles, they argue that “what would only be of tactical use during a military conflict is recklessly justified from the logic of strategic deterrence.”

Rather than treating Australia as Japan’s most important partner in middle-power diplomacy, the authors turn to South Korea: an established democracy and developed economy (one of the world’s ten largest) with per capita income equal to or exceeding Japan’s.

“Both countries [Japan and South Korea] are close allies of the United States; and they both see North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as acute threats and are concerned about China’s military build-up and coercive behaviour,” says the paper. “But at the same time, they share a deep interest in preventing a military conflict in East Asia that would have devastating consequences for both countries; and they want to maintain close and stable economic relations with China, which is their largest trading partner. In short, both Japan and South Korea desire an Asia that is not divided into two conflicting camps and would prefer a region that is open and inclusive.”

The scholars believe the new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the trade, investment and data pact Australia and Japan pressed ahead with after Donald Trump withdrew the United States — should be opened to simultaneous admission to both China, once it meets its qualifications, and Taiwan.

The paper’s authors aren’t arguing for an unarmed Japan. But they fear that conflict over Taiwan would have a devastating impact on Japan, probably as a result of Chinese attacks on US bases there. They agree that the United States must show it could beat off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Japan can best contribute to this deterrence by denial by improving the resilience and survivability of US and Japanese defence assets in Japan and by strengthening Japan’s own capabilities to defend its own territory, especially its southwest island chain that is close to Taiwan.”

The key point is that the capacity to strike Chinese military targets on the mainland with missiles would not add greatly to deterrence, since China has too many targets and could rain fire back on a more compact Japan.

While the Biden administration has recently emphasised that America’s “One China” policy hasn’t changed, calls by Congress members and former officials to drop the policy, extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan and defend Taiwan unconditionally are “especially provocative” and have raised the danger of conflict over Taiwan.

Japan’s aim “should be to maintain the conditions for preserving the status quo until the day comes when China and Taiwan can find a peaceful solution to the issue of unification,” the scholars urge, adding: “Moreover, Japan should not base its policies on forecasts of imminent military conflict or Chinese purported deadlines on unification and should not support the drawing of various ‘redlines.’”

The proposals in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” are likely to be welcomed by those senior figures in Australia’s foreign affairs and strategic circles — mostly out of government positions now — who criticise an increasingly security-oriented approach to Asia, along with our tightening “interoperability” with US forces and an apparent concurrence in US primacy.

They also chime with the kind of ideas the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was putting forward in opposition, which have been submerged by the unequivocal embrace of the AUKUS agreement on nuclear-powered submarines and advanced technologies.

Some of Kishida’s December proposals are similar to contentious Australian moves by Scott Morrison and now Anthony Albanese. Notable among these are a closer commitment to the defence of Taiwan and general alliance war-fighting capability, and the acquisition of 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawks and other missiles to strike back at China. The difference here is that Australia’s missiles would have to be fired from submarines, ships or aircraft some thousands of kilometres away from Australia.

The key question is: how much influence will “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” have in Japan? The answer is not much, at least immediately. The paper was published two days before Japan’s defence ministry, the Self-Defence Agency, came out with a new white paper that, as defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said, “explains how we will drastically reinforce our defence capabilities.”

On Taiwan, the white paper doesn’t go as far as Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party predecessors — Shinzo Abe said a Taiwan conflict would be an “emergency” for Japan and Taro Aso suggested Japan could join Taiwan’s defence — but it strongly supports the “counterstrike” capability in case Japan comes under fire.

Still, the yearning for peace in Japan, ingrained since the wartime US firebombing and atomic attacks on its cities, will act as a political brake on rearmament and assertive power play. Despite the belligerent drift in Chinese security policy since 2012 under Xi Jinping, the notion of an underlying Asian affinity also remains.

That notion last surfaced in 2009 when a splinter of the Liberal Democratic Party called the Democratic Party of Japan, led by former LDP politician Yukio Hatoyama, swept into power, interrupting near-unbroken LDP rule since the end of the Allied occupation in 1952. The foreign policies of the incoming government so concerned Washington that US secretary of state Hillary Clinton handed Japan policy to the Pentagon. (One of the authors of “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads,” Kiyoshi Sugawa, was an adviser in the Democratic Party government.)

Three years later, with the Democratic Party in disarray, the LDP was back under Shinzo Abe, who set about turning Japan into a militarily “normal” state.

Yet the LDP’s Kishida has gone part of the way in the direction proposed in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” by rescuing Japan’s relations with Seoul from the plunge under Shinzo Abe over South Korean grievances dating from Japan’s 1910–45 annexation of that country. Helped by South Korea’s election last year of a more conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and stepped-up missile testing and nuclear threats by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Kishida has developed a warmer partnership on several fronts, including defence.

In June, he also announced plans to expand staff in Japan’s foreign ministry to 8000 by 2030, a 20 per cent increase on current levels, in order to step up Japan’s engagement with the world, especially Asia, and counter China’s influence. While most reporting focused on China’s 7 per cent increase in defence spending this year, Beijing also said it was spending 12.2 per cent more on its diplomacy.

In Australia, meanwhile, the military brass section still dominates the foreign policy orchestra. The latest formal talks between Australian and US foreign and defence ministers, in Brisbane on 28–29 July, will have pleased China hawks and made critics of the alliance drift grind their teeth. In the background, some 30,000 American, Australian and allied defence personnel were engaged in the biannual Talisman Sabre war games.

Australia will be hosting more US forces, manufacturing missiles for both countries in two years, somehow getting hold of its US nuclear submarines despite problems in the US Congress, and — mentioned only vaguely — becoming more deeply involved in US space warfare capability. Albanese is out to pre-empt any criticism at the upcoming Australian Labor Party national conference in Brisbane.

The growing closeness to Washington has so far earned Labor no evident traction in getting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange free of US efforts to extradite and charge him under its espionage law.

Some sign of a resurgence in the influence of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came in April, when the government’s Defence Strategic Review recommended that it “be appropriately resourced to lead a nationally determined and strategically directed whole-of-government statecraft effort in the Indo-Pacific.” And glimmers of Foreign Affairs influence were evident when Albanese stressed the importance of diplomacy as well as deterrence and the need for “guardrails” to avoid conflict, and praised Biden for talking to China, at the annual Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore in early June.

But Foreign Affairs still seems undernourished for a more central role. A departmental spokesperson tells me that “work is under way across agencies to implement the government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review,” but evidence Foreign Affairs is still a supporting act to Defence can be seen in one of its latest budget allocations: $52.7 million over two years from 2023–24 “to provide international policy advice and diplomatic support for the nuclear-powered submarine program.”

The sophisticated debate in Japan and India’s ambivalence about deeper military ties under the Quad (including its late withdrawal from the Talisman Sabre exercise) indicates the department has much work to do in guiding its political masters around this complicated region. And if Donald Trump does return to the White House, the idea of Japan, India and Australia using the Quad to handle America might not be so far-fetched. •

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Security and defence agencies in both countries seem determined to drain any warmth from a relationship founded on a high degree of economic complementarity. In the Pacific, China’s attempts to become the security partner of small island nations have set off alarm bells; on the mainland, a vague new anti-espionage law has rattled foreign businesses. In Australia, shrill warnings continue about China’s influence-building, spying and emerging military threat, and the federal police have charged an Australian IT specialist in Shanghai under the Turnbull government’s foreign interference law.

The international setting isn’t helping. The United States and China, the two contestants for hegemony in the Western Pacific, are in the midst of a profound re-evaluation of the economic paradigms of the past forty years and how their two economies should connect.

China’s longstanding economic model, which fuelled rapid growth out of Maoist poverty, has come to the end of its road. After a decade’s reliance on construction, its domestic economy is burdened by large-scale debt and enormous numbers of empty apartments. Hopes of graduating from simple manufactures into high-tech products are threatened by American, European, Japanese and South Korean moves to retain control of the advanced semiconductors that run them.

America is abandoning the neoliberal doctrines it has followed since the Reagan era, adopting industrial policies aimed at bringing key industries back to home territory or friendly allies, chiefly through the trillions of dollars of subsidies and spending in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Transfers of American intellectual property and advanced equipment to China and other adversaries are under greater scrutiny.

In Australia’s case, an announcement of a Beijing visit by prime minister Anthony Albanese sometime later this year will signal that the thaw is still on. In contrast to his willingness to visit countries aligned in suspicion of China, though, Albanese is not looking at all eager.

“He doesn’t seem to have a lot of enthusiasm for this trip,” says Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador to China who is now a trade and business consultant in Beijing. “I’m really not sure what’s going on.”

From late last year, all the signs were that China’s leadership wanted to back away from the trade sanctions and freeze on political contacts imposed in 2020 in response to the Morrison government’s claim that Beijing was hiding the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s sharp tariff increases and other restrictions on a swathe of Australian exports — coal, barley, lobsters, copper, wine and timber — added up to about $20 billion in lost sales. Though small compared with our major exports to China (especially iron ore, which actually grew in value) the sanctions hit particular industries and regions hard.

At around the same time, a domestic national security case in China saw Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei suddenly disappear from her job with Chinese state television in Beijing. She later underwent a closed-court trial for allegedly passing state secrets abroad, though no verdict or sentence has been announced. All China-based correspondents for Australian media were withdrawn by their employers for fear of arrest.

The defeat of Morrison’s government in May 2022 changed the atmosphere. Informal talks on the fringe of multilateral meetings — notably Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s encounter with Albanese at the G20 summit in Bali last November — led to foreign minister Penny Wong’s meeting with China’s senior foreign affairs minister, Wang Yi, in Beijing on 21 December. It was the first Australian ministerial visit to China in more than three years.

Steps to ease the trade sanctions soon followed. The ban on Australian coal lifted in January, with exports jumping to the point that Queensland’s budget had an unexpected surplus for the year just ending. China’s consul-general in Perth visited a major lobster fishing cooperative, suggesting that the ban would soon end. In Canberra, Chinese ambassador Xiao Qian expressed a hope that the two countries would come back to “a normal kind of relationship” and praised Albanese’s “pragmatic approach.”

Talks ensued between senior officials at Davos and elsewhere. Australia agreed to suspend its action at the World Trade Organization over the barley ban. Then, in early May, trade minister Don Farrell went to Beijing to meet his counterpart, commerce minister Wang Wentao.

A few days later, Beijing announced it would resume timber imports from Australia, with no mention of the pest infestations cited as the reason for the ban. The trade had previously been earning Australian exporters about $700 million a year.

Xiao, the ambassador, also expressed concern for the imprisoned Cheng Lei, who has not seen her children in “such a long time.” “Personally, as a Chinese ambassador to this country, I can share with you: I have my personal sympathy to her and to her family,” he said. “So based on humanitarian grounds, I have been trying, I will continue to try to do my utmost to facilitate more access, that she could have some kind of access granted to her partner and friends and families to let them know that she’s OK.”

Further steps are awaited. Australia’s ambassador in Beijing, Graham Fletcher, who was barred from attending Cheng Lei’s trial in early 2022, was able to visit her in prison recently, but detected no change in her situation. Punitive tariffs on Australian wine and the halt in the lobster trade remain. No date has been set for a visit to Australia, mooted for July, by China’s new foreign minister, Qin Gang. (Qin replaced the long-serving Wang Yi, who remains in a supervisory role as head of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign affairs department.)

“They’ve achieved stabilisation — that’s good. Cabinet ministers are all disciplined in what they say about China — all that’s good, but I think the whole thing’s stalled in the last couple of months,” says Raby. “There’s not a lot of activity at the moment. The foreign minister’s dates haven’t been announced and July’s on us now. And they’re dicking around over the prime minister’s visit.”

But James Laurenceson, head of the Australia–China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, sees improvement, with China’s share of Australia’s trade starting to rise again after a sharp dip in the last two years and new items — electric vehicles from China and lithium ore going the other way for their batteries — gaining importance.

A new Lowy Institute poll, meanwhile, shows the Australian public’s concern about a threat from China easing, though still high and (short of sending troops) in favour of helping Taiwan defend itself. As a major threat, China has been overtaken by worries about cyber attacks from various sources.

Even if there has been a pause in the thaw, Australia’s experience still makes for quite a contrast to the state of relations between the United States and China, which US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Beijing to talk with Qin have barely warmed. Blinken pushed the line that Washington sought a “de-risking” of economic ties with China rather than “decoupling” and assured Qin that Washington doesn’t support Taiwan’s independence from China.

China seems not to have been mollified — and president Joe Biden’s subsequent reference to Xi Jinping as a “dictator” hasn’t helped. Chinese warships and aircraft continue to cut across US patrols through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. In Washington, Congress members and senators on both sides of the aisle compete in tough talk about China. The Chinese defence minister is still refusing to talk to his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, or re-open a military-to-military hotline.

While not directly accusing China, Albanese has aligned his government with America’s assertive defence manoeuvres in the Western Pacific and its cultivation of closer strategic ties with Japan and India. But for Biden’s debt-ceiling negotiations with the Republicans, Australia would have hosted all four leaders of this Quad in Sydney immediately after the recent summit of the Group of Seven advanced economies in Hiroshima.

And, of course, Albanese has fervently adopted the AUKUS agreement forged by Morrison to equip the navy, one day, with nuclear-powered submarines capable of projecting power far from Australian shores. The agreement has drawn predictable condemnation from Beijing, though it hasn’t been an economic deal-breaker.

Perhaps China’s leaders anticipate the AUKUS deal eventually collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, as a Marxist would say. Its embassy will be keenly watching the groundswell against AUKUS in Labor branches ahead of the party’s national conference in August. More broadly, the Lowy Poll found the Australian public “somewhat” supportive of AUKUS but unsure about its rationale or benefits.

China’s willingness to overlook far-off defence postures by minor powers is evident in this week’s visit to Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin by NZ prime minister Chris Hipkins and a large business delegation. It’s only a few months since Qin, the Chinese foreign minister, blasted his NZ counterpart Nanaia Mahuta over former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s strong warning about China’s attempts to form security partnerships in the South Pacific.

More recently, a New Zealand frigate sailed through Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea and was challenged by Chinese warships. But Wellington’s diplomatic deftness in recent years — not thrusting itself forward on things like the Covid investigation or security risks in Chinese telecom systems — has enabled it to keep channels open.

Australia’s hesitancy may come from the American mood playing into Canberra, Raby believes. “I think the pressure comes from the security and intelligence area in the US, through Shearer [Andrew Shearer, head of the Office of National Intelligence] and the security and defence people in Australia,” he says. “We are hobbled by these people. They don’t care if the New Zealand prime minister goes and takes a trade delegation and gets some deals. That’s not their agenda at all. Their agenda is to stay as close to the US as possible.”

Meanwhile, outside the defence–intelligence camp, other departments are working to keep up the economic momentum. Raby says talks are going on privately to extract the best advantage from a prime ministerial visit. “There is a negotiation about a package of outcomes,” he said. “And while everyone probably knows where you land, for some reason it seems to be difficult — I think on our side — to get there.”

Albanese has indicated that a complete lifting of the 2020 trade restrictions is required. He would also be hoping for resolution of Cheng Lei’s case, and preferably her release. “It would be very hard for Albanese to go without getting some concession on Cheng Lei,” says one of Canberra’s leading China specialists, who asked not to be named.

Beijing would want assurances that discrimination against Chinese foreign investment on national security grounds would be eased back from the absurd paranoia that ruled under Morrison’s government, when treasurer Josh Frydenberg blocked a Chinese company from taking over a Japanese-owned milk depot in Victoria.

In return for a resolution of Cheng Lei’s case, China would also want a promise that Australia won’t oppose its bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement covering e-commerce and intellectual property as well as conventional goods. Taiwan’s parallel application to join the CPTPP complicates this issue.

Given the barely concealed message of much mainstream media commentary in recent years — that seeking business deals with China amounts almost to treason — Albanese won’t want to look too enthused. Despite the easing of public concern about China, the Lowy Institute poll also found that 70 per cent of respondents want Australia’s supply chains to run through friendly countries.

For economist John Edwards, this is at odds with how Australians actually behave. “Australian homes are chock-a-block with Chinese-made kitchen equipment, refrigerators and washing machines, their garden sheds with Chinese-made tools, their desks cluttered with Chinese-made phones, computers, printers and peripherals,” Edward wrote last week in the Australian Financial Review.

“We wear clothes made in China and are now beginning to buy cars made in China,” Edwards went on. “In a roundabout way, these imports are paid for with exports of iron ore, coal, lithium, and other metals and minerals, often to China. They are also paid for by revenue from Chinese students in Australia, and Chinese tourists in Australia, with China the predominant source of both.”

A vast number of imports also come from third countries like South Korea and Japan that use Chinese components for their products. Allies like Britain and the United States meanwhile account for a very small proportion of Australia’s trade. For all its talk of “friend-shoring,” the Biden administration’s main focus, subsidising semiconductor manufacture in the United States, will be at the expense of two friends, Taiwan and South Korea.

And it’s not just Australian households that are chock-a-block with Chinese goods. The difficulty of disconnecting from China was shown in an interview this month by the chief executive of the huge US defence and aerospace group Raytheon. “We can de-risk but not decouple,” Greg Hayes told the Financial Times. “Think about the US$500 billion of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative.”

If Raytheon were to withdraw from China it would spend many years rebuilding its supply chains either in the United States or friendly countries, Hayes said. “We are looking at de-risking, to take some of the most critical components and have second sources but we are not in a position to pull out of China the way we did out of Russia.”

Raytheon is deeply involved in Australia’s defence. It provides the combat system for the Collins-class submarines, air defence for the army and missiles for the air force, and it helps run the space warfare ground station at Exmouth, Western Australia. All, it seems, reliant on Chinese-made components — and paid for, in large part, by our exports to China. Trading with “frenemies” is the international norm. •

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That firepower wasn’t enough. In a succinct summary of his judgement yesterday, Justice Anthony Besanko found that three newspapers — all of them part of the Fairfax group at the time — and their journalists had established the “substantial truth” of their reports that Roberts-Smith had murdered and assaulted unarmed Afghan prisoners. A Victoria Cross–winning war hero was instantly labelled a war criminal.

Notably, Justice Besanko accepted as true the report that Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed and handcuffed captive, Ali Jan, backwards off a cliff and then ordered a subordinate soldier to shoot him dead. Further details will emerge when the full 1000-page judgement is published on 5 June. A further fifty pages containing sensitive national security details goes to a more select readership.

What next? Roberts-Smith remains a free man. The defamation case was not a criminal trial. A judge finding substantial truth on the balance of evidence in a civil trial is not the same as a judge or jury finding guilt beyond reasonable doubt in a criminal case, as some of Roberts-Smith’s former colleagues in the Special Air Service Regiment were quick to point out.

The Seven Network — whose owner Kerry Stokes paid for Roberts-Smith’s legal expenses over 110 days of hearings as well as those of some supporting witnesses — has said Roberts-Smith continues in his job of managing the network in Queensland, though on leave, pending review.

Lead counsel Arthur Moses SC asked for and received stay of judgement to consider an appeal. An estimated $25 million has already been spent by the two sides; whether Stokes wants to put up more of his money remains to be seen. The defence side will seek to claim its share of this from Roberts-Smith and “third parties” (entities controlled by Stokes). So the Perth-based magnate could be up for most of the legal bill.

Will he quit or double down? If an appeal does proceed, it could delay a final resolution of the civil action for another year or more.

Watching it all closely will be the Office of the Special Investigator, or OSI, the war crimes unit that was revealed during the trial to be examining Roberts-Smith’s actions in Afghanistan. Will an appeal be an obstacle for the OSI if it is thinking of a move against the former soldier?

The OSI was set up after the defence force inspector-general, Justice Paul Brereton, found “credible” evidence that twenty-five current or former special forces personnel participated in the unlawful killing of thirty-nine individuals and the cruel treatment of two others during the Australian army’s deployment in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. Where the evidence justified it, the OSI was charged with launching prosecutions.

Under a former secretary of the federal attorney-general’s department, Chris Moraitis, and with former Victorian Supreme Court justice Mark Weinberg as special investigator, the office has a powerful array of federal police and legal investigators hard at work. Its first fusillade came in March, when a former SAS soldier, Oliver Schulz, became the first Australian serviceman or veteran to be charged with the war crime of murder, in his case for the alleged killing of an Afghan man in Uruzgan province in 2012. Schulz, who was given bail, is expected to be tried next year or in 2025.

Some other governments that fought in Afghanistan, including Britain and Belgium, are believed to be closely studying the Australian model. The OSI has also opened a close liaison with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, an important move because Australia, as a signatory to the Rome Statute setting up that tribunal, must show it is vigorously investigating and prosecuting any war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by its own armed personnel or citizens. Otherwise, the ICC is entitled to launch cases itself, with Australia having to hand over the suspects.

We also now know that the United States warned Canberra in early 2021 — via a US embassy defence attaché to Australian defence force chief General Angus Campbell — that the human rights violations detailed in the Brereton report might oblige the US military to suspend cooperation with Australian special forces under US legislation known as the Leahy Amendment.

Some might find this threat a bit rich given the United States’ counterinsurgency record and the character of some local forces it has sponsored, but the American military for many years cut contact with the Indonesian special forces, Kopassus, over its killings and abductions of government critics. That Australia now risked being tarred with the same brush must have been a shock.

With the Americans watching and Brereton having found credible evidence of specific war crimes, the Morrison government had little choice but to follow the judge’s recommendation for a formal criminal investigation. Now, with a federal judge finding “substantial truth” in the allegations against Roberts-Smith, the current government has added interest in the OSI’s work.

A finding for Roberts-Smith would have been a strong warning light for the OSI. The light has turned green, though the OSI would need to feel confident it has the high standard of proof required for a successful prosecution. It must be encouraged by the fact that former members of the tight-knit SAS have moved from being anonymous sources for the Fairfax journalists to protected and indemnified witnesses for Brereton, and then to in-camera sworn witnesses before Justice Besanko.

That these soldiers have risked ostracism to testify does, to a large extent, save the “honour of the regiment” for the SAS. Since Brereton, the unit has also been intensively retrained in the rules of war. The warped command system described by Brereton, whereby seasoned non-commissioned officers came to overawe both the younger lieutenants and the captains above them, has also been tackled.

But the question of responsibility doesn’t end with the soldiers committing the alleged offences. Fellow soldiers didn’t come forward. Officers failed to monitor their soldiers closely, signed off on falsified reports of enemy encounters, or implicitly condoned the practice of planting “throwdowns” (weapons or radio sets) on the bodies of killed civilians.

One of the most sickening allegations against Roberts-Smith was that he murdered a one-legged Afghan man and took his prosthetic leg back to base as a war trophy. In an unauthorised bar on the main Australian army base in Uruzgan known as the “Fat Ladies Arms,” Roberts-Smith and other soldiers used this leg as a beer-drinking horn.

The existence of this bar, flouting the rules against alcohol on operations, can hardly have escaped the attention of any of the officers or non-commissioned officers running the operation. That this breach of orders was tolerated perhaps shows the leeway afforded the SAS troops.

In the wake of the Brereton report, at least two serving or retired generals tried to hand in medals won as commanders in Afghanistan but were asked to hold off. ADF chief Angus Campbell’s decision to withdraw the unit citation from special forces personnel who’d served in Afghanistan was overruled by Peter Dutton as defence minister.

This week in Senate hearings, Campbell said a review handed to defence minister Richard Marles two weeks ago had considered whether “a small number of persons who held command appointments” should lose medals or honours. Campbell himself was commander of the Middle East task force covering Afghanistan in 2011–12, regularly visiting Australian troops in the field from his base in the United Arab Emirates, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role. Pushed by independent senator Jacqui Lambie, a soldier for ten years, Campbell said he was himself included in the review.

A wider responsibility rests on the political leaders and policy advisers who sent soldiers into an unwinnable conflict in which forty-one would be killed and many more injured, and after which dozens would commit suicide and others, partly for want of control and discipline, seem likely to face imprisonment.

Kim Beazley, newly appointed chair of the Australian War Memorial council, faces some immediate challenges. Two of his predecessors — Kerry Stokes and former defence minister Brendan Nelson, who appeared as a character witness for Roberts-Smith — left an unexploded bomb: an exhibit of Roberts-Smith’s combat gear and material extolling his heroism.

It may be tempting to simply remove the display. But rather than a historical airbrush, an exhibit about the Brereton inquiry and the OSI might better suit the times. Even Charles Bean, the AWM’s founder, included the 1918 rampage in 1918 by Anzac troops against Palestinians at Surafend in his official history of the first world war.

A sad reminder that the whole operation was never really about the Afghans came when the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade withdrew its embassy from Kabul at the first sign of US withdrawal, two months before the city fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Thousands of Afghans who had worked with Australian forces or agencies were left at risk of vengeance.

This week Australia’s former inspector-general of intelligence and security, Vivienne Thom, reported on their plight to the government. Responding, ministers including Marles, foreign minister Penny Wong and attorney-general Mark Dreyfus blamed the Morrison government and said criteria for asylum would be expanded. But Afghans have been given only until the end of November to apply — how they would do that in the absence of an embassy is unclear — and the program will close at the end of May next year.

Brereton’s recommendation that Canberra not wait for the end of investigations and trials to pay compensation to Afghan victims and bereaved families was put in the too-hard basket eight months later when the Taliban took Kabul.

The dust of Uruzgan, as sung about the Australian diplomat who performs under the name Fred Smith, will keep blowing in. •

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Along with Honolulu, those were the only places the two visited outside Australia to seek views on the strategic picture. Not Tokyo, nor New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta or Port Moresby.

In their wake, many observers are mystified by the relationship between the Defence Strategic Review and Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, a decision sprung on voters in September 2021 by Scott Morrison and endorsed with less than a day’s study by then opposition leader Anthony Albanese.

The parts of the Smith–Houston review curated and released by defence minister Richard Marles confirm that it didn’t question the Australia–United Kingdom–United States agreement, known as AUKUS. If Smith and Houston discussed what role the extraordinarily expensive submarines will actually perform, they did so in the still-classified parts of their review.

Press gallery defence reporters have already started the game of trying to winkle out of anonymous sources the scenarios that might have been canvassed by the review, including the defence of Taiwan and the lodging of Chinese forces in the Solomon Islands. Presumably Smith and Houston looked at the possibility that China would strike at Australia in the event of a Taiwan conflict in order to disable Pine Gap, North West Cape and other US war-fighting installations.

Sydney University historian James Curran, newly appointed international editor of the Australian Financial Review, raises a scenario that probably wasn’t mooted: the cutting of Australian shipments of iron ore and other commodities to China. “Such a devastating blow to Australia’s economy is never mentioned in these strategic reviews — economics and national security remain in uncooperating silos,” Curran writes.

As for the text that was released, many commentators have detected unsupported assertions and logical leaps. Most glaring perhaps was the reference to an “AUKUS Treaty” when the tripartite agreement was simply a joint statement by the three leaders at the US navy’s San Diego base in March.

Neither Morrison nor Albanese has presented the agreement to parliament for explanation and debate, let alone set in motion the ratification required of a treaty. Nor have the other two governments to their legislatures. Both Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak face elections next year and could be gone — in America’s case, possibly replaced by Donald Trump.

Those elections aren’t the only stumbling blocks. Washington’s agreement to sell between three and five Virginia-class submarines to the Australian navy from the early 2030s could be contingent on its own navy managing to step up production of these hunter-killer vessels, known as SSNs.

The Americans currently have about fifty SSNs, well below their force level goal of sixty-six. They hope to increase production of new Virginia-class boats to two a year, but the current rate works out at about 1.3 boats per year. At the AUKUS ceremony, it was disclosed that Australia would be investing perhaps $3 billion in helping the two US submarine yards speed up work, but the impact is likely to be quite marginal.

As it is, the US navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan shows the SSN force reaching the sixty-six-boat target in 2049 at the earliest. So the sale to the RAN will subtract from the American fleet — unless, of course, the vessels effectively operate as part of the US navy’s Indo-Pacific fleet. Marles has denied any such agreement or condition; veteran defence-intelligence analyst Brian Toohey scoffs at such assurances.

The three to five Virginia-class subs provided to Australia will already be about halfway through their thirty-year reactor life, and are seen as a holding capability until a jointly designed successor to Britain’s current Astute-class SSNs can be built. The first of those future submarines will be laid down in the early 2030s and delivered — from Barrow-in-Furness in England for the British navy, and from Adelaide for the Australian navy — in the 2040s.

But not from the American yards, despite the promised US contribution to the design. The US navy doesn’t want them, and is instead persisting in developing its own successor to the Virginia-class, known as the SSN(X). This raises an obvious question: having inducted an American boat into its fleet, why wouldn’t the Australian navy stick with the Americans for its successor?

It also brings us to perhaps the most perplexing thing about AUKUS: the involvement of the United Kingdom. Why did Morrison need to get his British counterpart Boris Johnson involved in approaching the Americans? Even if the Australian navy was inclined to Britain’s Astute-class, an American sign-off was required for the transfer of its reactor technology, a closely held US secret.

The proposed joint AUKUS submarine thus hangs on Britain, a declining power in great economic disarray. The Tories must be quietly chortling at having roped in the Australians to subsidise their naval plans. Adding to the puzzle is the post-politics job Morrison is said to be negotiating with a British defence group.

Australia’s close strategic alliance with the United States is generally accepted in our region. Japan and South Korea have similar alliances, Singapore and Thailand more tacit ones, and India and Vietnam a growing closeness. To revive close strategic ties with Britain undercuts decades of diplomacy designed to project Australia as an authentic regional partner. Surely the Australian navy has moved on from pink gins?

Meanwhile, the Smith–Houston review has rearranged our defence capacity around the nuclear submarines and their projected $368 billion cost. From a “balanced” force with a bit of everything, it is to become “focused” on projecting power further from Australia.

Ships and aircraft are to be equipped with longer-range missiles, their stockpiles built up by local production rather than imports. The army will also be more of a missile force, with the US artillery–missile hybrid known as the HIMARS extending its strike range to 500 kilometres and a greater amphibious capacity to move forward against threats.

To pay for this, the army loses a second battery of heavy guns, and its planned new fleet of South Korean– or German- designed, locally built armoured personnel carriers will be cut from 450 to 139, enough for a single brigade. At a mooted cost of $27 billion — averaging $60 million per vehicle — the project did seem absurdly inflated, but Smith and Houston mentioned no other means for protecting soldiers.

Nor do they discuss the fate of the army’s heavy tanks — its fifty-nine M1 Abrams and the updated replacements ordered by Morrison’s government. Perhaps a contribution to Ukraine, to be announced by Albanese when he is a guest at the NATO summit in July?

Accompanying the partial publication of the defence review has been some spin-doctoring designed to create the impression that the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, which has prevailed since senior defence official Paul Dibb’s 1987 white paper, was designed to deal only with low-level threats and is consequently obsolete. Actually, under the earlier doctrine Australia possessed quite an extended punch using air-refuelled F-18 strike aircraft and the six Collins-class conventional submarines.

Former army chief Peter Leahy is one who believes that Smith and Houston’s “all new” doctrine is really Defence of Australia Extended. “Its authors boldly state that it is not ‘just another defence review,’ but that is exactly what it is,” writes former defence official Hugh White, who wrote a defence white paper in the Dibb tradition in 2000.

Members of the hawkish commentariat, meanwhile, are apoplectic at the government’s failure to back with big money the review’s dire warnings of rising threats and a defence force “not fit for purpose.” They point out that many of the proposed new capabilities had been announced over the past three years. Some of them point to the government’s post-review backpedalling on capabilities already in the works. A committee headed by a retired US admiral will see whether the navy’s surface fleet needs all of the nine Hunter-class large frigates to be built in Adelaide, or a larger number of smaller corvettes.

“The Defence Strategic Review is worthless unless Defence stops deliberately dragging the chain,” declared the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan. “Strategy without dollars is just noise.” For Peter Jennings, former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the review was “a collection of unfunded compromises and shocking policy gaps.”

The funding gaps are not just directly in the military domain of the “national defence” strategy propounded in the review. Referring to increasing calls on the defence forces to help out in natural disasters caused by climate change, Smith and Houston suggest a separate emergency agency. They point to Australia’s small reserves of fuel and dwindling refining capacity, declaring that the energy industry should be directed to come up with remedies.

A different criticism of the review comes from White. “The choice we face today is whether to build armed forces designed to help the US defend its strategic position in Asia against China’s challenge and preserve the old US-led order,” he writes, “or build forces that can keep us secure as American power in Asia fades and a new order dominated by China and India takes its place.”

We can’t do both, White adds, “because that pulls our force priorities in very different directions.” On the one hand, AUKUS was all about supporting the United States against China in Northeast Asia. On the other hand, the defence review — despite its emphasis on the US alliance — focuses on the defence of the Australian continent and its approaches.

At points, the review doesn’t seem sure which way to jump. As White observes, it argues that Australia’s forces must be able to deter “unilaterally” but then, in the same paragraph, it says this can only be achieved by working with the United States. “Australia’s nonchalance about this,” says White, “is typified by the reckless gamble of entrusting our future submarine capability to the impossibly protracted, complex and risky AUKUS nuclear program, when much faster and more cost-effective conventional options are available.”

The Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen sees “tension and ambiguity” between the review and the AUKUS plans. “If the navy should be ‘optimised for operating in our immediate region,’ why do we need submarines optimised for operating thousands of kilometres north of it?” he writes. “Why is the RAAF Tindal air base being modernised so the United States can operate long-range bombers from there?”

A deeper contradiction looms for Peter Varghese, the former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and director of ONA, Australia’s top intelligence assessment agency. Talking to James Curran for the AFR, Varghese agreed that Australia should stick with the United States as the most important player crafting a new balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Whether we can sustain this position without handcuffing ourselves to the maintenance of US strategic primacy is the big challenge for our strategic policy,” Varghese said. “A balance of power which favours our interests and adopting US strategic primacy as a vital Australian interest are not the same thing, and it would be a mistake to conflate them.” •

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That the two officials — diplomat Nick Warner and former army officer Paul Symon — had gone on to head the Australian Secret Intelligence Service was a twist Sogavare must have noticed. Warner and Symon might have had close knowledge of the Solomons, and of Sogavare himself, but their ASIS links were also a reminder that Canberra could act behind the scenes if it wanted.

Which is what it did. Australian intelligence leaked the text of the Solomons–China security pact to Sogavare’s most feared domestic rival, Daniel Suidani, premier of the populous island of Malaita. Suidani, who had fallen out with Sogavare when the latter switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, had continued to deal with Taipei and talked of possible secession.

Jawboning by Scott Morrison and Joe Biden’s administration had persuaded Sogavare to disavow any intent to allow Chinese military bases. Yet he went ahead and signed the security pact anyway.

In response to the leak, Sogavare’s critics in the national parliament moved a vote of no-confidence. It failed amid allegations that Chinese interests had bribed MPs to support the prime minister. Mobs opposed to the deal looted and burned large parts of Honiara, including its thriving Chinatown. Australia and New Zealand sent in police and soldiers. Australia and China then competed to supply weapons and vehicles to the Royal Solomon Islands Police. (The country of 700,000 has no military.)

Meanwhile, an attempt by Beijing to broaden its foothold turned into a debacle. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stormed a Pacific Islands Forum session in Fiji offering a broad security pact with the ten island states that recognise Beijing. He was rebuffed for trying to pre-empt the extensive consultation that such regional initiatives require.

The crisis was over. But strategic rivalry simmers. Last year, thirty-three Solomons police officers went to China for extended training. Just before Anthony Albanese visited Port Moresby in January to cajole PNG’s James Marape into a bilateral security treaty and announce expanded seasonal worker places, Beijing gave the PNG defence force a new hospital. The United States might have reopened its embassy in Honiara, but when Sogavare hosts the South Pacific Games in a new Chinese-built stadium this November, a VIP from Beijing will no doubt be guest of honour.

In Australia, meanwhile, the perceived Chinese threat in the Pacific has created a school of academic and think-tank study. As Michael Wesley observes in the superb first chapter of his new history of RAMSI, Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, Australia’s worries tap into an old seam. Denial of the Pacific to anti-Western interests is “arguably the foundational imperative of Australian international policy,” Wesley argues. Hence the “disproportional reactions” when Pacific states court deals with potentially hostile interests, which have included the Soviet Union, Gaddafi’s Libya and Chavez’s Venezuela.

At such moments, Canberra is wont to call on its imperial friends, the British and now the Americans, to do the heavy lifting in defence and aid. “Australia’s engagement with the Pacific is a story of passion outstripping actions, of ambitions outstripping abilities,” Wesley writes. “It is a record of long stretches of lassitude and inattention punctuated by intense periods of concern and engagement.”

If pieces like David Kilcullen’s essay in the latest edition of Australian Foreign Affairs can get a run then we are in one of those intense periods. Stepping outside his usual field of counterinsurgency, Kilcullen makes much of China’s vaunted but largely untested claims to have “carrier-busting” steerable ballistic missiles, and conjures up a Chinese thrust down through the Pacific like that of Japan in 1942, using island missile bases to cut us off from America.

Why it would want to do this is unfathomable. Unlike Japan at that time, China has all the petroleum and strategic minerals it wants from willing sellers like Australia. Its military focus is on securing the South China Sea for its ballistic missile submarine force and keeping up pressure on Taiwan. Forces projected into the South Pacific would be sitting ducks. But, says Kilcullen, don’t look at intent, look at capabilities. By this measure, I’d add, India is also a threat.

Rory Medcalf, who heads the spook school known as the National Security College at the Australian National University, accepts China’s “neo-colonial ambitions” in the Pacific as a given, but is more nuanced. A Chinese military base would be a direct threat, he says. “But even absent that scenario, the prospect of a Pacific island government turning to the guns and truncheons of a one-party nationalist megastate to supress domestic dissent is confronting.”

Again unconsciously tapping into the buck-passing tradition traced by Wesley, he sees Australia acting as a “guide and an informal coordinator” for powers in Europe, North America and Asia “poised to help the Pacific cope with China’s disruptive power.” But he also has to acknowledge that the “Indo-Pacific” perspective of which he has been a leading proponent can be seen by Pacific islanders as diluting their regional identity and demanding they take America’s side against China.

On that score, there have been no takers. As Wesley remarked at the launch of his book, the attitude of Pacific governments to Chinese aid and investment is “bring it on.” The region has never had so much aid from, and access to, Australia and other US-aligned powers.

Peter Connolly, a recently retired Australian army colonel who recently finished an ANU doctorate on China in Melanesia, shows in his Australian Foreign Affairs essay, “Grand Strategy,” just how flexible, resourced and patient China’s approach to the region is becoming. The last few years have seen a leap in the quality of its diplomats posted to Melanesian capitals: two senior colonels of the People’s Liberation Army intelligence branch became defence attachés in Port Moresby and Suva in 2020; elsewhere, in countries without militaries, senior police officers are posted as liaison officers.

Senior colonel Zhang Xiaojiang found the PNG defence force less open to cultivation, so he has concentrated on the under-resourced Royal PNG Constabulary, upgrading its CCTV surveillance in Port Moresby, funding a new medical clinic and sending in riot-control equipment ahead of last year’s elections. “By sensing gaps and enquiring about needs he gradually discovered ways to develop appreciation for the PRC” — the People’s Republic of China — “and appeared to learn from PNG’s traditional partners in the process,” Connolly writes.

Police forces across Melanesia certainly have plenty of resource gaps. By focusing on a Chinese military threat that seems quite improbable, our security watchdogs are barking up the wrong tree, ignoring the real security issues facing Pacific islanders, particularly in Melanesia.

Only in Fiji do the police have anything like the numbers widely seen as appropriate to population: some 3000 officers for 900,000 people. And it was there, during Frank Bainimarama’s recently ended prime ministership, that the police became an instrument of political repression without much Chinese assistance.

Solomon Islands has 1150 police for its 736,000 population, and PNG only 7300 (including reserves) for a population generally put somewhere around ten million. The PNG force has hardly grown since independence in 1975, while the population has trebled.

Few citizens rely on the PNG police for help. If they do, they must pay, ostensibly for fuel and other call-out expenses but also with an element of straight-out bribery. The police can be brutal, corrupt and under-trained. Often, they act as guns for hire used by loggers and other commercial interests to repress local communities. It’s for these reasons that citizens report crime and conflict to traditional elders, pastors in their church or neighbourhood committees in urban settlements.

A recent study for the PNG-Australia Policing Partnership, a forum for the police leadership in both countries, urged a doubling of PNG police numbers, an annual budget lift of around $51 million and a one-off injection of $1.6 billion to provide the resources the force needs to do its job.

Sinclair Dinnen, a long-term ANU-based scholar of the region’s crime and security, doubts this is the answer. “The police have to be better looked after,” he tells me after his recent field trip to PNG. “But in some ways there’s an argument for having a small, well looked after, professional force who have enough fuel and access to transport, who are skilled up in investigations and doing the policing kind of thing.”

At grassroots level, Dinnen sees another tier of security modelled on the “community auxiliary police” New Zealand has been funding in Bougainville since the end of the civil war there two decades ago. The island has only three police stations, often unmanned. The auxiliary police, drawn from communities, are often better educated than the regular police; in consultation with local chiefs, they deal with less serious crimes.

In some parts of PNG, Dinnen concedes, restoring law and order requires more than this hybrid model. He points to regions like Hela and Enga, where winners and losers emerge from large-scale resource projects and rivals fight it out with military-grade firearms. “You get what are low levels of insurgency, in fact,” he says. “And no police force should be expected to deal with that.”

Wesley’s book shows us that RAMSI strayed into this field of community policing for a while. After the initial success in restoring peace, “a cultural divide between modes of policing, which came to be seen as ‘Western’ versus ‘Pacific’ ways, began to open up,” he writes. Australian and New Zealand officers were seen as enforcement-oriented and aloof. Police from the Pacific islands invested time and effort in building links to local communities, taking care to respect cultural and religious values and acknowledge traditional leadership structures.

The islands police “understood the importance of sharing food, attending church, and working with traditional kastom processes to help resolve disputes,” writes Wesley. With police likely to be underfunded once RAMSI packed up, it was a good model. But for reasons Wesley doesn’t explain the pilot scheme’s funding ended after five years; presumably the scheme was beyond Canberra’s comprehension.

Wesley, who was deputy director of the Office of National Assessments at the time, sees an unusual confluence in the circumstances that gave birth to RAMSI. The Solomons government was on its knees and bankrupt; John Howard was flush with his accidental success in East Timor; and, with the disaster of Iraq still to become apparent, it was the high-water mark of muscular Western nation-rebuilding intervention.

It is hard now to think of any government that would allow large numbers of foreign police and finance officials — with legal immunity, investigative and arrest powers, and tax-free status — to handle a country’s security.

For all the diplomatic nuances used to gain regional cover for Australia’s intervention and the initial restoration of civil order, though, RAMSI gradually ran out of steam as local politicos reasserted their role as distributors of state resources. Within five years of RAMSI’s departure, Australia was again sending in riot police and soldiers to quell unrest and providing more lethal firearms to local police.

Now, Canberra’s focus is elsewhere, as it orders longer-range anti-ship and land-attack missiles to fend off the perceived threat of an attack by China. The Australian Federal Police has set up a new Pacific branch directed at border security and drug smuggling — our problems — rather than nurturing models of policing that suit Pacific communities. Dinnen, for one, suggests Canberra needs to cool it. “Sogavare is not going to be there forever, and in Honiara and PNG below the elite level there’s a lot of anti-Chinese racism that breaks out in urban areas.”

In her essay in the latest Australian Foreign Affairs, Solomons journalist Dorothy Wickham cites community-level fears of where the Chinese embrace might take the government. But she also points out that islanders’ everyday contact is less with Australians than with Chinese people: “Australians are here as aid workers, diplomats and police, but they are not mixing with local people.” With thousands of young islanders getting involved with the Pacific labour schemes in Australia and New Zealand, a new familiarity and affection is possible — as long as abuses are seen to be punished.

As for geopolitical rivalries, “the Solomon Islands government should try to get what it can from foreign powers,” Wickham writes. “But we need to choose those things with long-term benefits in mind. We should be careful what we wish for.” •

Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands
By Michael Wesley | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 310 pages

Girt by China: Power Play in the Pacific
Australian Foreign Affairs | Issue 17, February 2023 | $24.99 | 128 pages

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The deal developed by the RAN’s vice-admiral Jonathan Mead and his project team, and accepted by the Albanese cabinet, is like a boy given carte blanche in a toy shop: we’ll have three to five of the US-model Virginia-class subs; then eight or more of the British follow-on to the existing Astute-class, to be built in Adelaide.

Albanese insists that Australian “sovereignty” will be paramount. But until 2033 or so, Australia will be protected in large part by US Navy and Royal Navy nuclear submarines patrolling out of the RAN’s Cockburn Sound base near Perth. The base will be expanded at a cost of $1 billion to accommodate them.

Only in 2033 will the RAN get its first nuclear-powered submarine, a Virginia-class boat transferred from the United States. It is unclear whether this — or the next two, three or four subs — will be new or second-hand. That will depend on how quickly the two US shipyards building the Virginia-class can ramp up production beyond the two per year demanded by the US Navy and concerned members of the US Congress.

To this end, Biden is asking Congress for US$4.6 billion. Canberra will be putting in A$3 billion, with a bit of that going to the British submarine yard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Rather than building new slipways, the extra capacity will be created by introducing a nightshift at the American yards. With US unemployment at a record low and the yards paying somewhat miserly wages to new staff, that might be hard to achieve. Australia is also hoping to rotate workers from Adelaide into the US and British yards to gain experience.

American experts think the transferred submarines will be second-hand, probably from the third and fourth production “blocks” commissioned since 2014. This means some will have as few as fourteen years remaining of their thirty-three-year reactor life when they are transferred in 2033 and beyond.

The price tag is put at somewhere between A$268 billion and A$368 billion over thirty years. The government insists that the initial $9 billion, over the next four years, won’t be felt at all: it will be met by $6 billion that would otherwise have gone to the cancelled French conventional submarines and $3 billion carved out of other defence programs. Expect protests over the latter, especially from the army, which is likely to see its heavy armour cut back.

The San Diego announcement by the three leaders has been greeted by a display of bipartisanship. The Coalition claims AUKUS as its own initiative, under the helmsmanship of Scott Morrison. But once it comes to finding the money — likely to be equivalent to 0.15 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product each year — the bipartisanship will start to fray.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has already nobly offered to support cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care to fit the bill. Expect some in Labor and the crossbenches to suggest the stage-three tax cuts and the capital gains tax discount are fairer sacrifices. What better excuse than national security and the Chinese peril for breaking election promises?

The biggest loser in the short term is South Australia. It is left with only the two-year-long refurbishments of the RAN’s Collins-class conventional submarines, one by one from 2026, when the first boat, the HMAS Collins, reaches thirty years in service.

Further work depends on progress in the joint British, US and Australian design work on the Astute-class follow-on submarine, known as the SSN-AUKUS. If it is ready to build, the first steel will be cut and laid down in the early 2030s and the first submarine commissioned in the early 2040s, with the rest to follow into the late 2050s. It is unclear whether the US will build some of these AUKUS submarines for itself, or continue developing the Virginia-class successor, known as the SSN (X).

BAE Systems has taken nine to eleven years to complete each of the seven Astutes for the Royal Navy, as against just under seven years for the American yards to turn out a Virginia-class boat. That relative slowness has already given rise to doubts about the promised schedule and cost of what is an entirely new design.

“Defence does not have a strong record in this area and the navy in particular has struggled to maintain design discipline,” Peter Dean, a professor and defence expert at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, wrote in the Nine papers. “Constant design changes have slowed projects, frustrated industry and blown out budgets,” Dean went on.

BAE Systems is also running the $45 billion program for nine Hunter-class frigates. They were originally priced at $30 billion, and the first was supposed to be laid down in Adelaide last year but work has not yet commenced. The frigate “was supposed to bring synergies by sharing the design between the UK, Canada and Australia,” wrote Dean. “But this project has blown out the budget, hit delays and fractured its initial approach as the design has constantly been modified, raising concerns about its viability.”

Former Coalition foreign minister Alexander Downer, for one, thinks the 40 per cent cost savings of building the SSN-AUKUS submarines overseas rather than in Adelaide will be tempting for a future government. “Assuming South Australia’s relative decline in its share of the national population will continue,” Downer wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week, “federal governments will become less concerned about holding a diminishing number of seats in South Australia and more concerned about how they’re going to pay for their other expensive and right-on plans.”

It’s tough, but Adelaide has declined the chance of sending a fourth generation of the Downer dynasty to Canberra.

Cameron Stewart, a former defence signals analyst who is now one of the Australian’s best strategic commentators, thinks it could go further than this, and Rishi Sunak or his successor could be in for the kind of treatment Morrison meted out to France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The decision to go for the British design is “madness,” he wrote. “After Australia has done all of the very hard work — overcoming the regulations, the red tape, the export control, the politics — in securing a system whereby we can acquire three to five Virginia-class submarines from Washington, it gives it all up. For what? To help build from scratch in Adelaide a completely separate next-generation British designed nuclear-powered submarine.”

“This all but guarantees a future nightmare of massive delays, development risk, price blow-outs and schedule nightmares — everything that we see on every first-of-type submarine project around the world,” Stewart went on. It would be better just to keep on acquiring Virginia-class submarines rather than making a “needless U-turn” to keep Adelaide and the British happy.

The long schedule at least means that if the balloon goes up over Taiwan — as feared within the next three years by the hawkish thinkers recently assembled by the Nine papers in their “Red Alert” series — conflict between the United States and China will happen without us being able to do much about it, nor China paying us much attention.

We still await a formal statement to parliament and the Australian people outlining why we need these very large submarines with the capability to cruise to China’s nearby waters and bombard it with cruise missiles. Defence of the archipelagic approaches to Australia will be left to smaller, silent conventional submarines: our own Collins-class for a while and then perhaps with some help from the Indonesian, Singaporean and Vietnamese navies. •

The post Torpedoes ahead! appeared first on Inside Story.

Canberra scholar James Cotton takes us back to those years in his new book, The Australians at Geneva, introducing us to a real-life group of talented people who worked in Geneva with the League and the associated International Labour Organization. He shows us how Australia’s role in world affairs evolved from the crass nationalism of prime minister Billy Hughes at the Versailles peace talks and in the years immediately after the first world war (“Who cares what the world thinks!”) to the ambitious internationalism of H.V. Evatt at the San Francisco conference after the second.

And what an array of Australian talent it was, working as League and ILO officials, support staff, visiting delegates to assembly sessions, and members of interest groups. As Cotton writes, “Geneva was Australia’s school for internationalism.”

Whether Hughes liked it or not, Australia had no choice but to engage with the League. At the insistence of American president Woodrow Wilson, colonies captured from the Germans and the Italians during the war had not been annexed to the victors, but were instead granted as League of Nations mandates, with sometimes tough conditions attached.

Australia was let off lightly, gaining relatively strings-free control of German New Guinea and Nauru. The government in Canberra wasn’t expected to grant early independence to either territory, or to open up two-way migration and trade.

But the Australian mandates didn’t altogether escape scrutiny. Why had a surplus in New Guinea’s public accounts been sent to Canberra rather than invested locally, came a query from Geneva. Why were workers in Rabaul on strike? How come explorer Mick Leahy was happily writing about shooting thirty tribesmen on his trek into the New Guinea highlands?

Canberra had other reasons for engaging with the League. It felt that a strong presence in Geneva could help ward off pressure on Australia to water down the White Australia policy, dismantle its tariff wall and submit to compulsory arbitration of disputes.

Despite the awkward queries, Australia came to see the League as a benign theatre, compatible with the emerging British community that came to be known as the British Commonwealth of Nations. Australia’s presence in the League — overseen by the high commission in London, which former prime minister Stanley Bruce headed from 1933 until 1939 — also helped extend its contacts to less familiar nations.

Former Rhodes scholar William Caldwell, a veteran twice wounded in France, was among the impressive Australians who took a senior role in Geneva, and he went on to feed the wider vision he gained there into the public debate back home. Having joined the ILO in 1921, he visited Australia a few years later to try to persuade sceptical state governments and employer groups to improve labour entitlements — though he received little help from trades halls convinced the ILO was a capitalist plot to divert workers from the revolution.

With states holding much of the responsibility for labour issues, Caldwell and another Australian with ILO experience, Joseph Starke, were among the first to suggest that the Commonwealth could use its treaty-making powers to intervene. The pair’s arguments were first tested in the High Court in 1936 and finally used successfully in 1983 to stop Tasmania’s Franklin Dam.

As his remit in Geneva extended to “native and colonial labour,” Caldwell also kept a file on the treatment of Aboriginal employees. In a 1932 letter found by Cotton, he wrote that “Australia is shamefully neglecting her obligations towards that dispossessed race.” Progressives like Mary Montgomerie Bennett were welcomed at the ILO, where they were able to raise the treatment of Aboriginal Australians.

Raymond Kershaw, another Rhodes scholar with a distinguished war record, joined the League at the end of 1923. As an officer in its minorities section he helped deal with the grievances of subnational ethnic, linguistic and religious groups stranded in other countries after the contraction of Germany and the break-up of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. It was an insoluble problem and a thankless task.

Kershaw left the League in 1929 to join the Bank of England. In 1930 he accompanied the bank’s Sir Otto Niemeyer on his mission to crack the fiscal whip over Australia’s “feckless” Depression-era state governments. Kershaw at least wrote papers arguing that the pain of Niemeyer’s prescriptions should be shared rather than fall mainly on the unemployed and poor.

Another Australian, Duncan Hall, had studied at Oxford during the war and completed the equivalent of a doctorate on the future of the Commonwealth. With Fabian socialists Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb and Leonard Woolf, he had done much to popularise the idea of a grouping of like-minded nations that could be a model for — or the nucleus of — the League. Failing to get an academic position back in Sydney, he joined the Australian delegation to a new regional body, the Institute of Pacific Relations, run from Honolulu.

From there he took up a professorship at Syracuse University in New York state, where he set up a model League of Nations among his students, a teaching simulation widely copied. On a visit to Geneva in 1927 he was invited to join the League’s opium section, which was trying to regulate trade in narcotics, as well as investigating child welfare and the trafficking of women.

Hall’s inspections and conferences took him out of Europe, to Iran, India and Siam (as Thailand was then known). In Calcutta he encountered erudite Indians who pointed out the double standard in the British Commonwealth: a higher status for the white dominions, a much lower one for the Asian and African colonies. The perspective he gained during the trip contributed to the emergence of an “Australian School” of international relations that looked beyond the Atlantic.

In the 1930s, Hall turned to psychology to explain the rise of mass movements supporting authoritarian regimes across Europe. He drew on the work of scholars, including the Austrian psychoanalyst Robert Waelder, who applied Freud’s concept of the “group mind” to the trend. Hall worried that advances in technology like radio were intensifying group consciousness, bringing people closer, extending mob oratory to entire nations and creating a collective psychosis.

At the League, Hall urged that a “realist” view of this threat should prevail over “Utopian pacifism.” His warnings were not welcomed by League secretary-general Joseph Avenol, who was ready to compromise with dictatorships. He barred Hall from making public addresses or broadcasts on his trips.

Another Australian in Geneva with a fascinating backstory was C.H. “Dick” Ellis, who arrived as a correspondent for a popular London newspaper in the late 1920s, and improbably wrote a heavyweight book on the League that became a standard reference. Ellis was also an MI6 officer, having served in the British army during the war, taken part in the anti-Bolshevik intervention in Central Asia, and studied languages at Oxford. He later became a friend of Australian external affairs minister Dick Casey, and in the early 1950s, by then very senior in MI6, he advised Casey on the formation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.

As Frank Moorhouse shows in his trilogy, the mood in Geneva shifted from the optimism of Grand Days, set in the twenties, to the gloom of Dark Palace, set in the thirties. The hopes of world disarmament foundered at a failed League conference in 1929. Japan annexed Manchuria in 1931 and withdrew from the grouping. Germany quit after Hitler took power in 1933, and other nations began pulling out. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was met with ineffective sanctions. Despite Wilson’s early enthusiasm, isolationism kept the United States out.

With the failure of peacekeeping, diplomats including Australia’s Stanley Bruce tried to keep the League useful by expanding its roles — not without a touch of national self-interest — in fields like health and nutrition. As Cotton remarks, “Bruce also considered that a world thus organised would be more receptive to exports of Australian agricultural commodities.”

In May 1939, with war becoming more likely, Avenol turned to Bruce to help rescue the League from its dire straits and the impasse on collective security. He asked the Australian to chair a committee to report on extending the League’s role in encouraging cooperation on health, social matters, economic affairs and financial regulation. By the time Bruce reported in August, his proposals had been overtaken by war. Avenol resigned to join the Vichy government in France.

An Irish deputy-secretary and a handful of staff kept a skeleton office going. After the war, however, Geneva was no more than an annex to the new, New York–based United Nations, though the city also became home to some of the agencies that took up the Bruce committee’s ideas, and the ILO continued to run from there.

Moorhouse’s novels picked up on a pioneering aspect of the League that Cotton also explores: the role of women. From the outset, the League declared all its positions open to female recruitment, though few women made it into positions more senior than the typing pool. Surprisingly, the otherwise conservative Hughes government decided in 1922 that Australia’s delegation to the League’s annual assembly should include at least one woman.

The League gave women like Emilia Hernya a role, albeit subordinate, and a voice.

In practice, the Australian women were only appointed as substitute delegates, not full members. When one woman asked her delegation leader what her role was, he responded, “Your business is to hold your tongue.” In 1927, women’s rights campaigner Alice Moss did stand in for delegate T.J. Ley, a federal MP and former NSW justice minister — as well as a confidence man and, later, convicted murderer — who had other things to do in Europe rather than attend a League committee in dreary Geneva.

Many of the women delegates had well-off spouses who could provide the funds for them to travel and agitate. Back in Australia they gave speeches and wrote articles about the League, often through the League of Nations Union branches that sprang up around Australia and across the world.

Bessie Rischbieth, the wife of a wealthy wool dealer in Perth, was an outstanding advocate of the League. In articles that still read well, writes Cotton, she pointed out how the effects of the Versailles treaty could be seen in the rise of the Nazis, and argued for a stronger League covenant, lower trade barriers, the abolition of exchange controls, and an open door to goods from colonies and mandates. As Cotton notes, “Seen in its context, Rischbieth’s assessment of the times was as comprehensive and insightful as any offered in Australia in the later 1930s.”

Melbourne woman Janet Mitchell was in Shanghai as a delegate to an Institute of Pacific Relations meeting in 1931 when the Manchurian crisis erupted. An Australian newspaper correspondent, W.H. Donald, persuaded her to visit Mukden (now Shenyang) and see for herself. She stayed a year in Harbin, a city teeming with Japanese occupiers and White Russian refugees.

Back in Australia Mitchell became a frequent broadcaster for the League of Nations Union, and in 1935 she was invited to join the League information section (probably by Duncan Hall, whom she had met at the 1925 meeting in Honolulu). She arrived in time to be disappointed by the League’s handling of the Ethiopia crisis. As she left Geneva, and the League, she wrote, “I began to see it, not as it was conceived by its founders as an effective force for peace, but as a little world born before its time, bound to fail.”

Ella Doyle, an Australian shorthand typist, moved to the League from the Australian Imperial Force staff in London. In 1937 she visited Germany and wrote an article about the Nazi crackdown on “decadent art,” pointing out that the works under attack were by the cream of modern German artists, one of whom had designed the stained-glass windows in the League’s new building. After 1945 Doyle had several UN engagements, and much later, in 1978–81, she was Australia’s first female ambassador in Dublin.

Alas, no one on Cotton’s list of Australians fits the character of Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Campbell Berry. Emilia Hernya perhaps comes closest, though her parents were Dutch and British and she was schooled in France. But she moved to Australia in 1913 and was naturalised in 1917 before returning to Europe and joining the League in 1920. Hernya’s childhood had been colourful: her parents worked near Paris’s Moulin Rouge nightclub where as a toddler — Cotton informed me by email — she is said to have sat on Toulouse-Lautrec’s knee and pulled his beard.

The model for Edith, Moorhouse confessed, was actually a Canadian, Mary McGeachy, who worked in the League’s information section. McGeachy left a huge volume of writing about the League and its time, which Moorhouse transferred into his character’s thoughts and speeches. She also appears in the novels as one of the real-life characters around Edith.

Though Hernya and McGeachy socialised in places like Geneva’s International Club, and no doubt had their love affairs, the model for Edith’s adventures on the boundaries of sexual identity was Moorhouse himself. Geneva provided neutral ground in more ways than one.

Moorhouse’s trilogy, an Australian classic unlikely to be added to a school reading list except by the bravest principal, is yet to make it to the screen as the film or series many of its fans have long anticipated. Two production groups have started projects but let them lapse. Meantime, I can attest that the trilogy is just as enjoyable on a second reading, and Cotton’s fascinating book amplifies the factual thread of Australian involvement. •

The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist Diplomacy in the Interwar Years
By James Cotton | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 246 pages

The post With Edith Berry in Geneva appeared first on Inside Story.

The tripartite pact known as AUKUS grew out of a Morrison brainwave some six months after he won what seemed an unwinnable election virtually single-handedly. Under the agreement, Australia is to acquire — and even build — eight US- or British-designed nuclear-powered submarines, known as SSNs.

According to senior political correspondents Peter Hartcher and Paul Kelly, Morrison started asking his officials about possible alternatives to the contentious contract with France’s Naval Group to build twelve Shortfin Barracuda-class conventional submarines in Adelaide. Not long after, in March 2020, he asked defence secretary Greg Moriarty to prepare an options paper, which was delivered two weeks later. Then, in May of that year, he asked Moriarty and defence force chief Angus Campbell to form a group to weigh up the nuclear-power option. Headed by then navy chief Michael Noonan, the group worked in a tight security bubble.

Efforts continued to try to resolve differences with Naval Group over the cost and local content of the French submarines. No one seems to have considered asking the French about the nuclear option, yet the Shortfin Barracuda was a special conventionally powered version of the Barracuda nuclear-powered attack submarine and the Americans had agreed to fit it with their most advanced war-fighting electronics.

One problem was the fact that the reactors in the French submarines use low-enriched (around 5 per cent) uranium in their fuel rods, which require replacing every ten years. This means fewer problems with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but would have meant relying on a foreign power. Without a domestic nuclear industry capable of enriching uranium and fabricating rods, any Barracuda submarine bought by Australia would have to sail to France every decade or else somehow arrange transfer of fuel rods from France.

The Australian team and its political masters were seized by the revelation that current American and British nuclear submarines are fuelled by highly enriched (92 per cent) uranium rods that work for the entire life of the submarine, thirty years. Once built, it was claimed, they could be operated by the Australian navy without recourse to American support. Despite the US and British submarines having operated for many years, that news somehow came as a surprise in Canberra.

So, in February 2021, a visiting Australian naval delegation broached the idea of a British or US purchase with the sea lords of the Royal Navy, who gave it a cautious nod as long as the Americans could be brought on board. Britain’s US-derived reactor technology is the product of a unique transfer of know-how by the United States in 1958.

Next, the Americans were sounded out. The first approach was made by Morrison’s handpicked director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer, and Australian ambassador Arthur Sinodinos at the end of April 2021, in a meeting with the Biden administration’s senior adviser on Indo-Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell. Then, the following month, Morrison’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, met with Biden’s secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Another few weeks later, Morrison was a guest at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, where he felt able to broach the plan with Biden himself. Strangely, British prime minister Boris Johnson was also at the meeting with Biden. The American president clearly detests Johnson for his role in Brexit and potential reopening of conflict in Northern Ireland, but his presence didn’t queer Morrison’s pitch.

Although Biden stipulated that the nuclear transfer must be a bipartisan exercise on the Australian side, Morrison gave opposition leader Anthony Albanese and his deputy just twelve hours’ notice of the announcement of the tripartite agreement to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and collaborate on futuristic technology. The announcement came in September last year in a video hook-up with Biden and Johnson.

Labor endorsed what became known as the AUKUS pact, no doubt seeing it as an attempted political wedge on Morrison’s part but presumably also trusting it to be a well-thought-out response to China’s increasingly confrontational approach and an equally considered lift in Australia’s defence capabilities. After securing government in May last year, though, the Albanese government might have been expected to take a harder look at the AUKUS deal and the SSN component.

There were early signs of such scrutiny. In August, the government appointed former Labor defence and foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence forces chief Angus Houston to advise on what defence capability Australia needs to meet “the increasingly challenging geostrategic environment.” They were given until March this year to submit their findings (though speculation suggests they’ll report next month) and handed a secret preliminary report to Marles in November.

From hints thrown out by Albanese and Marles, the Smith–Houston review was encouraged to be iconoclastic. In particular, the army’s projected force of 127 heavy Abrams tanks for $2.5 billion and 450 new armoured fighting vehicles at a mooted $27 billion cost — or an average of around $60 million each — seems likely to come into question.

“Our defence assets need to not be about fighting a land war defending western Queensland because that is highly unlikely,” Albanese said in an end-of-year interview with the Nine newspapers, “but a lot of our assets are not really the ones that we necessarily need for this century and for the times — and also their location as well.”

Yet the SSN project seems off-limits. The review’s terms of reference don’t say that explicitly, but Smith and Houston are asked to recommend the “defence posture” needed in 2032–33 and beyond “in light of recently announced large-scale projects.”

This suggests that a parallel defence taskforce, given eighteen months in September 2021 by Morrison to find a pathway to acquiring the SSNs, has proceeded without any fear of being called off.

A defence briefing note describing how the Smith–Houston review relates to the AUKUS submarine project states that it “will help ensure we maximise the potential of this and other AUKUS partnership initiatives in Australia’s best strategic interests.” In other words, defence spending will be trimmed elsewhere if necessary to finance the SSNs, estimated to cost us $200 billion.

Meanwhile, Morrison’s submarine taskforce, with its staff of 360 defence and industry personnel, says it’s on schedule to report to the government in March. (Both it and the final Smith–Houston report are likely to be kept secret.) The SSN taskforce chief, Jonathan Mead, was giving little away in an interview with the Australian’s Cameron Stewart in December. The SSN, he said, would “deliver for Australia a potent war-fighting capability [and help] to deter anyone who may seek to do harm to Australia.”

Mead left a riddle about how the navy can avoid a “capability gap” between likely delivery of the SSNs in the 2040s and 2050s and the retirement of the existing six conventional Collins-class submarines between 2038 and 2046 — assuming that major refits can safely extend the operating life of the Collins boats. Mead said he is focusing only on nuclear submarines, not on stopgap acquisitions of conventional subs.

The capability gap could be even wider if, as British defence minister Ben Wallace and others have suggested, the three AUKUS partners work on a common design for a new generation SSN to replace both the current US Virginia-class and the British Astute-class, each designed in the 1990s and coming towards the end of their production runs.

Mead will also wrestle with the question of local production, which Marles still insists will happen. Ideas floated include building the submarine hulls in Adelaide and then barging them to the United States or Britain for the nuclear reactor to be inserted, or barging the nuclear reactor module with its bomb-grade uranium core to Adelaide. The latter prospect might unsettle some in the City of Churches: when the Astute submarines are fuelled up in Barrow-in-Furness on the west English coast, the local council hands out iodine tablets to residents.

Awaiting the two reports, a clamour of urgency has built up within Canberra’s defence commentariat. Even before last year’s election, Peter Dutton was expressing the hope that the Australian navy could lease one or two Virginia-class SSNs from the US navy to bridge the gap. Having ditched the French, and before them the Japanese, the then defence minister was ready to dump the British.

In November, shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie said Canberra should stop insisting the submarines be built here. Authoritarian powers are “on the move” and it would take too long to start with Australian domestic production, he said. We should try to order two submarines from US yards for delivery by the end of this decade.

But the two US naval yards that build submarines are flat out with orders from the US navy for more Virginia-class SSNs. A letter to Joe Biden in December from two senior US senators argued that adding orders from the Australian navy would stretch American industrial capacity to “breaking point.”

Purchased or leased, the Australian navy won’t have the engineering and command expertise to operate nuclear submarines for many years without importing talent from the US or British navies and arranging maintenance at American or British bases. The submarines will be Australian assets in name only. They will also spend a lot of time undergoing maintenance, and are likely to be available for six-month cruises only fifteen times in their thirty-three-year operational life.

Mixed in with this clamour has been the extension of another Morrison initiative, the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, with its goal of acquiring “more potent capabilities to hold adversary forces and infrastructure at risk further from Australia, including longer-range strike weapons, cyber capabilities and area denial systems.”

Compounding a sense of alarm during Morrison’s prime ministership was the abrupt deterioration in relations with China caused by his call in April 2020 for outside health inspectors to storm into China, invited or not, to find the origins of Covid-19, and the federal police raid on the homes of four journalists with Chinese official media two months later. China responded with trade sanctions to the tune of $20 billion a year and the arrest of Australian journalist Cheng Lei.

With Chinese leader Xi Jinping choosing to wear a military uniform to review huge parades of his armed forces, and Chinese ships and aircraft jostling US forces in nearby seas, it was not hard for defence hawks in Canberra to connect the military build-up and the relationship chill to produce the conclusion: China is a military threat to Australia.

Consequently, Morrison announced a $1 billion scheme to create a domestic missile manufacturing industry to build up ammunition stocks. This quest for greater lethality at longer range has continued under Labor with the planned acquisition of 800-kilometre-range US anti-ship missiles for the air force, 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and Norwegian anti-ship missiles for major navy surface ships and, just recently, twenty US 100- to 300-kilometre-range precision rocket artillery units for the army. The latter, known as HIMARS, have proved a devastatingly effective weapon for Ukraine.

It is unclear whether Canberra intends to acquire its own satellite reconnaissance and targeting systems to direct these missiles, or whether it will rely on American systems.

With multibillion-dollar arms purchases coming thick and fast, defence analysts have thrown off all restraint. A paper last month from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggested the air force acquire a squadron of the newly unveiled US air force B-21 bombers. This bat-winged stealth bomber, with its unrefuelled combat radius of 4000 kilometres, could plug the long-range strike capability gap until the SSNs arrive, according to the institute. Still a prototype and yet to be tested in the air, B-21s are likely to cost more than $2 billion each.

Though this thinking was initially presented as a means of hitting any enemy planning to hit Australian assets between 2000 and 3000 kilometres away, and could thus be seen as an extension of the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, it has morphed in some quarters into a strategy of deterrence: that is, if any enemy thinks it can land blows against Australia it must expect blows in return.

Hence the preference for the larger of the two contending SSNs, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest version is 10,200 tonnes and can carry up to sixty-five torpedoes, Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles or other long weapons. Britain’s smaller Astute-class (about 7500 tonnes) carries thirty-six long weapons.

This extra capacity shifts the submarine’s role from denying access to Australian waters to retaliating or attacking. It should be an unsettling thought. Until now, deterrence against a rival superpower was left to the Americans. Are we having doubts about that, just as the South Koreans and perhaps some Japanese are?

And, for China, what kind of deterrence would be offered by the prospect of a couple of submarines coming close to its coast and firing off conventional-explosive-tipped missiles at a score of land targets?

This line of thinking also betrays unease in Canberra about the American nuclear umbrella. In countries anxious about nuclear-armed strategic rivals but without a reliable superpower protector, deterrence thinking goes in one direction, towards an independent nuclear capability: ask India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel.

But the nuclear submarine push is unlikely to be thrown off course by questions about its feasibility — and certainly not by suggestions from defence analysts like Hugh White, Brian Toohey and Clinton Fernandes that smaller and less noisy conventional submarines are a greater threat to enemy navies than nuclear subs, are better suited to operations in the archipelagic waters of Australia’s approaches, and are better matched with our budgetary and industrial capacities.

Nor will the hawks be thrown off course by the equally forlorn thoughts of some in the international relations community, along with figures like Paul Keating, that getting closer to the anglophone powers is a retrograde step. Australian proponents of the American alliance have long claimed that Southeast Asians are secretly pleased by our closeness with the United States and are not fussed about our tightening “interoperability” and now “interchangeability” with US forces. There is not a lot of evidence for this.

Hawkish commentators are thrilled that the stepped-up “rotation” of American forces through northern Australia will make us somehow pivotal to the US posture against China in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea, instead of a rear base to disperse forces away from Chinese attack. Their worry is that things will blow up before we have the SSNs to join in.

Unless Admiral Mead produces a technological surprise out of his braided hat, though, the sheer impracticality of Morrison’s grand scheme may soon become apparent. This may give more scope for foreign minister Penny Wong to work on giving AUKUS a less dominant place in Australia’s strategic position.

Morrison’s AUKUS plan raised “valid questions about Australia’s sovereign capability,” Wong said in a speech to Sydney University’s US Studies Centre a week after the September 2021 announcement. But, she added, “with the prospect of a higher level of technological dependence on the US, how does the Morrison–Joyce government assure Australians that we can act alone when need be; that we have the autonomy to defend ourselves, however and whenever we need to.”

The new pact had to be “additional to” and not “instead of” Australia’s contribution to existing regional architecture, Wong said. “It doesn’t replace the ANZUS alliance, the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, APEC or the Quad.”

For Wong, Southeast Asia remains a prime focus of Australian national interest. “Our strategic ambitions must be matched by equally ambitious efforts to respond to the region’s needs. This of course requires a bigger investment in our diplomacy, including in our economic engagement and development program. Submarines might help protect the region, but on their own they won’t build the region we want — a region that is stable, prosperous, as well as respectful of sovereignty. And submarines can help our national defence, but won’t of themselves prevent efforts at economic coercion.”

Judging by her round of regional visits and the more low-key tone of dialogue with China, these are surely the kind of thoughts she is expressing within the government. But having so warmly embraced what Paul Kelly has tentatively called the “Morrison doctrine” it may take a while for Albanese and Marles to loosen their attachment to the Anglosphere, return strategic policy to the mainstream represented by the Defence of Australia doctrine, and extricate themselves from what is turning into another Morrison fiasco. •

The post Time to rethink the Morrison doctrine appeared first on Inside Story.

Like its model in London — the British Museum, which opened in 1759 — it was a flower of the Enlightenment. Its role was twofold: to explore, classify and exhibit the peculiar animals and plants of the Antipodes, and to document the peoples newly encountered by Europeans.

As became the notorious case for the British Museum and its counterparts in France and Germany, colonialism and settlement accompanied and aided the collecting of specimens. By the time the Australian Museum got into its stride in the second half of the nineteenth century, Voltaire’s “noble savages” had been overtaken by evolutionist attempts to rank human subspecies. As Brendan Atkins observes in his compact but panoramic new book, The Naturalist: The Remarkable Life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch, “Darwin’s theories became evil in the wrong hands, as they drew conclusions about racial superiority from bone measurements.”

Atkins’s subject is a little-remembered scientist whose brief but highly productive career covered both natural history, brilliantly, and ethnography, more controversially. McCulloch started work at the high-water mark of evolutionary theory and colonialism, and ended just as broadcast media was beginning to challenge and rival the static collections of museums.

Allan Riverstone McCulloch was the great-grandson of Scottish Radicals transported to New South Wales in 1820 for demanding universal suffrage, lucky not to be hanged and beheaded like their two leaders. The family flourished, with a grandson becoming a member of NSW parliament and a land developer, a symbiosis that continues to plague the state. McCulloch’s middle name derives from this uncle’s greatest deal, the subdivision of an estate that became a Sydney suburb.

When his uncle went bankrupt “he did what any gentleman would do in the circumstances: he fled the colony.” This left McCulloch’s widowed mother without much support for herself and her four children. At age thirteen, through family connections, Allan was placed as an unpaid cadet in the Australian Museum, apprenticed to Edgar Waite, the curator of vertebrates.

It was the start of a deep education within the museum and on expeditions with Waite around the coast, islands and waterways of Australia. McCulloch became a world-leading fish biologist and, with the help of artistic training from Julian Ashton, a superb illustrator of his specimens.

His public lectures, livened by lantern slides, were packed. The Latin tag for the Murray cod includes his name. Just before his death in 1925 he had written a script for the newly introduced radio and was using a movie camera to document wildlife on Lord Howe Island. In more modern times, he would have been a local David Attenborough.

Atkins, who trained as a zoologist himself and then, after a career as an environmental scientist on the Murray, edited the Australian Museum’s magazine, was intrigued by McCulloch’s story. Why was such a successful scientist airbrushed out of the museum’s history, snidely derided in its 150th anniversary history, and still occasionally subject to rumours he was syphilitic or a drunk sipping on his own preservation alcohol? (The latter transgression was by an earlier curator.)

The Naturalist circles towards its unhappy end in chapters focused on McCulloch’s artistry, his work on fishes and his ethnographic asides. It was in the latter, Atkins thinks, that “cracks first appear in McCulloch’s persona.” Visiting the Torres Strait Islands in 1907, he and senior colleague Charles Hedley were primarily collecting fish and shells but had also been asked to augment the museum’s collection of Indigenous artefacts.

Already, the locals were making artefacts for sale to visitors rather than for their own use. Seeking more original objects, the scientists went to a hidden grave on Nagir Island, where their delving in the dirt revealed a model of a bird made from turtle-shell plates sewn together with split cane. They smuggled it out.

Much later, in 1922, McCulloch accepted an invitation from photographer Frank Hurley to join an expedition into the remote waterways of the Papuan Gulf, Fly River and Lake Murray. One of McCulloch’s roles was to relay Hurley’s accounts of his daring exploits by Morse code to a sponsoring Sydney newspaper. Atkins recounts more dubious acquisitions, some by outright theft, others by purchase under intimidating circumstances from village elders who would not normally allow strangers to see, let alone take away, their sacred objects.

McCulloch and Hurley sent one shipment of this plunder back to the museum without the Papuan administration’s knowledge when they sailed their ketch Eureka directly to Thursday Island, an Australian territory, for repairs. A larger second shipment was impounded at the Papuan port of Daru after a missionary recounted Hurley and McCulloch’s frank admissions of their collecting methods.

An aggrieved Hurley kept up an acrimonious public correspondence with Papua’s governor, Sir Hubert Murray. But McCulloch’s notes, included in the second shipment, revealed feelings of guilt about the acquisitions. The shipment was eventually released to the museum, with a few confiscations, and Hurley gave up his protests.

McCulloch was to “take the fall for these thefts,” Atkins says. Soon after he returned to Sydney in 1923, wracked by dysentery and malaria, a fight erupted at the museum. Two powerful trustees appointed by the state government, auditor-general Frederick Coghlan and businessman Ernest Wunderlich, decided the place needed to be more popular.

They ordered the museum’s scientists to curb their expensive research and get out into the suburbs and country towns to spread their knowledge. On a pretext, they dismissed the senior-most scientist, Charles Hedley. Two eminent scientific trustees, professors Edgeworth David and William Haswell, resigned in protest, but to little avail. “Now with Hedley gone, the trustees took aim at McCulloch,” writes Atkins, “who had by default become their most senior scientist and star curator.”

In May 1924 an invitation came for McCulloch to deliver a paper at a big scientific conference in Hawaii on the Pacific’s food, agriculture and fisheries. Coghlan and other trustees voted against his attendance. It was a devastating blow to McCulloch, still reeling from illness and with his battering over the Papuan artefacts worsening his tendency to bouts of depression. After he suffered a breakdown in early 1925, he was given a year’s leave on half-pay. Respites on his beloved Lord Howe Island helped a patchy recovery.

At this point a former NSW premier, Joe Carruthers, stepped in. He was going to Hawaii, and persuaded the state government to pay half of McCulloch’s expenses to go along and attend another conference, this one focused on fisheries. 

There, McCulloch found the event still vaguely in the planning stage. But he wrote a paper, was invited to give talks, and enjoyed the company of local figures while waiting for proceedings to begin. It seemed like a turning point. A proposed Pan-Pacific institute wanted him as chief scientist. After a long bachelorhood, he had fallen in love with a woman, Jean Innes, on Lord Howe. Yet he was still disturbed in mind and unable to sleep.

In a poignant chapter, Atkins delves in great depth into the feelings of regret and self-reproach that might have deepened McCulloch’s mood swings, and reaches a tentative diagnosis of bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it used to be called.

On his death, McCulloch was lauded as a great scientist. But no church in Sydney would bury a suicide. His friends at the museum raised funds for a granite monument on Lord Howe Island’s seafront, facing the reef he had explored, and buried his ashes beneath it.

Coghlan’s arrogance in a non-museum matter got him removed from office and the museum celebrated its centenary amid reports of internal disorder. It was not until 1975 that new legislation removed outside trustees and put scientific and professional directors in charge.

Conflicting pressures of popularity and science remain. The Australian Museum is currently hoping for a record million-visitor milestone this year on the back of a Lego dinosaur exhibition and another featuring fibreglass sharks. It’s no doubt true that schools and parents are less likely to bring their kids to another exhibition showing how the land snails of Norfolk Island have been rescued. Science is now more likely to deal with the gloomy subjects of species extinction and climate change, while ethnology turns to revisionist accounts of colonialism, turning the concept of “savagery” around.

Since at least 1981, when a large timber slit-drum was returned to newly independent Vanuatu, the Australian Museum has been returning objects to traditional owners, mostly in quiet fashion. But the turtle-shell bird stolen by McCulloch and Hedley from the grave on Nagir Island is still in the collection. In June this year, in the village of Usakof on Lake Murray, I found villagers demanding the return of “powerful objects” stolen by Hurley and McCulloch from their longhouse in 1922.

The museum is now readying a new Pacific gallery to be opened next year. It would be wonderful if this could be accompanied by a more visible examination of its vast holdings of Oceanic objects, mostly in off-site storage, with objects taken in less scrupulous times identified and their disposition with their communities of origin discussed.

It would be satisfying, too, to see McCulloch’s wonderful watercolours of fish made available as prints and his surviving dioramas of sea and birdlife accorded heritage status. Yet none of the museum’s senior directors turned up to the launch of Atkins’s book, which is nonetheless a fine memorial to this outstanding Australian. •

The Naturalist: The Remarkable Life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch
By Brendan Atkins | NewSouth | $34.99 | 190 pages

The post A museum’s fall guy appeared first on Inside Story.

Collaery, a former ACT attorney-general, was charged with having breached secrecy laws when he revealed that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service had bugged Timor-Leste government offices in 2004. At the time, Australia was negotiating a maritime boundary straddling a rich natural gas field in the Timor Sea. Also charged was one of Collaery’s clients, a former ASIS officer known as Witness K.

When the case eventually went to trial, Justice David Mossop accepted the Coalition government’s argument that much of the evidence needed to be kept from the public, and some of it even from Collaery himself, to protect national security. But a three-person bench of the ACT Court of Appeal, including the territory’s chief justice, overturned Mossop’s ruling.

Before the court could publish its reasons, Dreyfus’s predecessor, Michaelia Cash, directed the government’s most senior legal officers to seek to have the ruling overturned by the High Court, with a stay on the decision in the meantime. Otherwise, Cash’s lawyers argued, information “likely to prejudice national security” would be made public. Open justice was of “undoubted importance,” they said, but national security considerations had to be given “the greatest weight.”

That argument was received sceptically by chief justice Susan Kiefel and her High Court colleagues. Justice James Edelman asked solicitor-general Stephen Donaghue if the ACT chief justice’s error was merely that she “did not make the order that you sought.” Offered a choice between having the application thrown out or having the stay left in place, Donaghue opted for the latter.

Dreyfus’s termination of the prosecution left the status of the ACT Court of Appeal’s ruling unresolved. Surprisingly, he then asked the court to reconsider its decision to allow the contentious evidence to be made public. The ACT’s new chief justice, Lucy McCallum, heard the application in September, and her decision is now awaited.

The Human Rights Law Centre’s Kieran Pender, who has followed the Collaery case, says it is “very unusual” for the government to try to “relitigate” the Court of Appeal judgement. “Given the question of redactions has already been determined once by the Court of Appeal, and the government has withdrawn the High Court appeal, to attempt a second go at the Court of Appeal is remarkable.”

Instead, says Pender, “the attorney-general should get on with dropping the outstanding prosecutions of whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle and reforming Australia’s lacklustre whistleblowing laws. Whistleblowers should be protected, not prosecuted in secret trials.”

Collaery believes the Albanese government is “encased” by the same circle of security advisers, in and out of the public service, who orchestrated the moves against Witness K and himself. But he can see why Dreyfus might have accepted advice against publication from ASIS director-general Paul Symon, a retired army general and former head of defence intelligence.

“When you’ve got an ex-warrior, albeit with no actual experience in the trade — when you’ve got a man of that eminence and decency, which he has, advising you that publishing the Collaery case would prejudice national security, you accept that advice,” Collaery tells me. “But it’s tripe. It was khaki dressage.”

Beyond the court actions themselves, many influential figures are incensed that responsibility for the murky chain of events stretching back to 2004 could remain unresolved.

Among them is the president of the International Commission of Jurists in Australia, John Dowd, a retired NSW Supreme Court judge and former state Liberal leader. In a letter to prime minister Anthony Albanese on 17 October he called for a royal commission looking at whether ASIS’s bugging operation broke Australian law, whether the secret service was deployed for private commercial gain, whether the national security claims for secrecy are valid, and whether Collaery and Witness K should be compensated.

Not surprisingly, Collaery also wants a royal commission. It should encompass not only the ASIS operation and its propriety, he argues, but also issues of “utter, utter treachery” he says he isn’t at liberty to discuss. Before he was charged, Collaery had security clearance to handle a range of sensitive legal issues involving intelligence agencies and personnel — the very reason why Witness K was originally referred to him for advice in relation to his misgivings about having led the Dili operation.

Collaery particularly wants a fairer outcome for Witness K, who was given a three-month suspended sentence in June last year for conspiring to reveal classified information. He contrasts the treatment he and K received with the kid-glove handling of senior ASIO and other Canberra officials who were exposed as having been compromised by the KGB when the Soviet intelligence agency’s chief archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, handed over a vast trove of secret records following his defection to Britain via Estonia in 1992.

“We never compromised any national security,” says Collaery, “but those who did and were exposed after Vasili Mitrokhin took the stuff to Estonia were just left alone. Not even dishonourably discharged. And allowed to keep their medals and decorations and all the rest.”

Moreover, Collaery adds, “K was never a whistleblower, despite the media constantly calling him that. If anything he was leading the charge as a mutineer. And for good reason, and he wasn’t alone. The reason why they brought it down on us was to stop L, M, N, O, P, Q [from going public]. So the story’s not told.”

On the face of it, a royal commission should appeal to the new government. It could sheet home the duplicitous Timor-Leste dealings to Coalition leaders at the time of the bugging, notably prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer, and perhaps also other members of the cabinet’s national security committee (which would have included treasurer Peter Costello, attorney-general Philip Ruddock, defence minister Robert Hill and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone).

Yet the idea appears not to have seized Albanese — if the ICJ letter ever got to him. As his department’s acting first assistant secretary for national security, Philip Kimpton, wrote to Dowd, “We are not aware of an intention by government to pursue such a course of action at this time.”

A Labor figure knowledgeable about foreign policy issues explained why the government might be wary about looking into the 2004 spying incident. “Did it continue?” the figure asks, clearly mindful that similar intelligence-gathering activity might well have been going on under the Rudd–Gillard government.

Canberra’s fixation on securing the big undersea gas deposit now known as Greater Sunrise goes back to its first discovery in the late 1960s. Diplomacy, legal argument and espionage were harnessed to negotiate maritime boundaries with Indonesia, Portugal, Indonesia again, and Timor-Leste with the aim of bringing as much of the gas field as possible into Australia’s economic zone. This push by successive Coalition and Labor governments extended over decades.

The Witness K revelations started emerging under Labor, which continued to uphold the boundary negotiated by Downer (with help from the ASIS operation) between 2004 and 2006. It was not until 2018 that Timor-Leste, having had Downer’s 2006 border agreement nullified because it wasn’t negotiated in good faith, convinced an arbitration court at The Hague to endorse a new agreement that moved the border to the middle of the Timor Sea and gave Timor-Leste 80 to 90 per cent of the revenue from Greater Sunrise.

If a royal commission isn’t on the horizon, Albanese and Dreyfus may have opened another avenue for inquiry by creating the new National Anti-Corruption Commission. Susan Connelly, the Josephite sister who fought hard for a median-line boundary and strongly backed Collaery and Witness K, is one who has signalled a reference to the NACC.

This would put targets on the backs of Downer, who later accepted a consultancy from the leader of the Greater Sunrise consortium, Woodside Petroleum, and the late Ashton Calvert, who as secretary of Foreign Affairs supervised ASIS at the time of the bugging and on retirement became a director of Woodside. But the NACC legislation has an escape clause that allows the attorney-general to declare an investigation to be against the national interest.

Foreign minister Penny Wong seems to hope that focusing on practicalities will shift attention away from this rancorous past. In October she appointed former Victorian Labor premier Steve Bracks to broker agreement on developing Greater Sunrise. Bracks’s extensive post-political advocacy for Timor-Leste includes work on the maritime boundary.

Getting the gas field into production has become a matter of urgency for the government in Dili, which has been dipping into its Petroleum Fund — its sovereign wealth fund derived from oil and gas revenues — at an unsustainable rate. The last revenue from existing oil fields will flow into the fund at the end of this year.

If the current rate of withdrawal is maintained, the fund will run down to zero over the next decade. By 2034, according to the country’s finance ministry, Timor-Leste faces “a fiscal cliff” that will necessitate a “radical cut in all spending.” Using similar language, the World Bank has referred to an “inescapable macro-fiscal cliff in the next decade.”

“Timor-Leste is a petro state without much petrol,” says the respected Dili-based think tank La’o Hamutuk in a recent report. The government’s policies “continue to be based on blind faith that, because oil money has carried the country thus far, it will continue to do so indefinitely.”

Politicians in Dili follow former prime minister Xanana Gusmão in pushing for Greater Sunrise to be connected by pipeline to Gusmão’s Tasi Mane scheme. Forecast to cost US$15–20 billion, this complex on the island’s south coast would include an oil refinery, LNG plant, offshore gas and onshore oil pipelines, and a supply base for offshore petroleum projects, along with transport infrastructure and new towns.

Woodside Petroleum and many oil industry experts say the proposed pipeline is too risky. It will need to traverse the 3000-metre-deep, steep-sided, unstable Timor Trench between the gas field and the coast. Other analysts say its revenue and employment benefits have been wildly exaggerated by Tasi Mane’s proponents. Dollar for dollar, investing in coffee production could create six times as many jobs and six times as much GDP growth per dollar as investing in Tasi Mane, says one recent study.

The alternatives to the Greater Sunrise pipeline would be a floating LNG plant, or a connection to existing pipelines in the Timor Sea to transport the gas to Darwin for processing. Timor-Leste would still get most of the revenue but would need to stump up far less capital and would avoid the risk of pipeline failure. Australia might be seen to be getting an undue share of the benefits, though, despite its perfidy.

In September newly elected president José Ramos-Horta tried to pressure Canberra into overruling Woodside’s objections by threatening to bring in China to take over the project. Although China’s banks are reported to have already turned the project down as unfeasible, a Chinese state oil firm is said to maintain a permanent desk inside the office of Timor-Leste’s tiny state oil firm, TimorGAP. Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has not always put economics ahead of political-strategic factors.

TimorGAP, meanwhile, has released selected passages from a report by British oil industry consultants ERCE claiming that the running costs of the Tasi Mane and Darwin processing options are much the same. TimorGAP is still refusing to release the full 130-page ERCE report, says La’o Hamutuk, despite Ramos-Horta saying, on his Canberra visit, that this would be helpful.

Adelaide consultancy EnergyQuest says it would be far more productive for all parties to be talking instead about plate tectonics. The Indo-Australian plate is moving north at seven centimetres a year, meaning it would move 1.5 metres over the life of the project. “Building a pipeline [to Timor-Leste] subjected to the full force of one of the most rapid tectonic plate movements in the world is an idea that should never have got off the ground,” says EnergyQuest.

But the country’s successful independence struggle left a complex legacy. “In 1999, Timor-Leste ousted the Indonesian occupiers in defiance of ‘experts’ around the world who told them it would never happen,” wrote La’o Hamutuk’s Charles Scheiner in the recent report. “In 2018 they transcended ‘expert’ advice again, coercing Australia to agree to a fair maritime boundary.”

As a result, says Scheiner, “some Timorese leaders, especially veterans of the independence struggle, now believe they can accomplish anything, regardless of physical or economic realities.” That means Steve Bracks has his work cut out if he is seeking to pierce what some call a “mystical” belief in the pipeline — especially if, as seems likely, pipeline-proponent Xanana Gusmão returns as prime minister after next May’s election.

But Bracks may emerge as an envoy to Canberra rather than to Dili, persuading the Australian government to detach Woodside Petroleum from its lead position in the Greater Sunrise consortium, perhaps through a buyout, and let Timor-Leste take the running and the risks. Woodside has already written the value of its 33 per cent stake down to nothing and has plenty of other projects to keep busy with. Continuing to run Woodside’s case makes Australia look selfish and colonialist, say critics.

Bracks’s ability to persuade would be strengthened if Canberra showed any contrition over the spying and lack of good-faith negotiations — by holding a royal commission or other review, by apologising, and by rejoining the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice on maritime boundaries, from which Downer withdrew Australia in 2002.

The current limbo is far from satisfactory, says Bernard Collaery. “All it does is leave Australia’s great moral issue in ambiguity.” •

The post Timor gaps appeared first on Inside Story.

It was late 2002 or early 2003, not long before Howard publicly committed to joining George W. Bush and Tony Blair in waging war on Iraq. Papers by ASPI analysts, including inaugural director Hugh White, had disputed the case for war and opposed Australian involvement.

In a gathering that included government figures, White, a former deputy secretary for strategy in the defence department, found himself under attack for breaking ranks at a time of crisis. Howard, who was present, intervened. “No, no,” he said. “Hugh’s doing exactly his job.”

Two decades later, the notion of an ASPI head taking an adversarial stand against the government of the day and its defence–security establishment — or even allowing alternative voices in its analytical ranks — seems unthinkable.

The Australia Institute’s Allan Behm, another former senior defence official, is among those who think ASPI has strayed far from its original mandate. Howard’s aim, he says, was to create “a freestanding and independent commentator on mainstream national defence issues” that would hold defence officials like him accountable. It would make sure their advice “was subject to appropriate scrutiny by other people who knew as much as we did or indeed knew better than we did.”

White, who is now emeritus professor of strategic studies at ANU, believes a founding principle of the institute — that there should be no “ASPI view” — has also been eroded. Over time, the institute developed a single, hardline view on how Australia should respond to the biggest foreign policy and strategic challenge for a long time, the rise of China.

“Very little of what ASPI has published, except some material on its blog, has seriously contested what you might call the Canberra orthodoxy on those big questions,” White tells me. “And that’s a failure of ASPI to fulfil its true function.”

“Maybe that’s unfair,” he adds after a pause. “Where ASPI has criticised the prevailing orthodoxy and government policy it has criticised it solely on the grounds it hasn’t gone far enough.”

Talk to many of Australia’s most senior figures from the worlds of defence, intelligence and foreign relations, and similar criticism of ASPI comes thick and fast. Even among the toughest, though, the criticism is tempered with praise for Marcus Hellyer and other ASPI analysts who are still doing what used to be the institute’s core business — pulling apart the defence budget, scrutinising the uniformed and civilian defence machine, and assessing the costs and benefits of weapons systems.

Critics chiefly argue that ASPI has talked up the China panic and then proposed only one way to deal with it: more powerful weapons in larger quantities, closer military ties to the United States and an adversarial posture.

“ASPI started doing too many things, then it took on the ‘wolverine’ tendency” — a hawkish attitude to China — “to such a degree that I always knew what it would say about China so it wasn’t worth reading,” says one retired but still influential security figure. (Like some other critics keen to keep communications open, he asked not to be named.) “There was some genuine research which was valuable, but all of it was directed to proving a point. And once a think tank goes down that road and it’s a case for the prosecution, which it was, then it is no longer as influential as it might have been.”

With ASPI seen as echoing rather than questioning the Canberra orthodoxy, outsiders could assume it to be the voice of Australia, and a rather strident one. Those who actually set policy — the diplomats, defence personnel and intelligence analysts with perhaps more nuanced views — are muzzled by official secrecy requirements.

“ASPI has gone into a rather dark direction, where what it is really doing is amplifying a kind of new security ideology, a rather old-fashioned one,” Behm says. “Where it has ended up is in the creation of a network of reinforcing binaries, which in fact distort reality and are built around a premise that China is embarked upon world domination.”

That premise leads logically to very substantial build-ups in military capabilities, says Behm. “The consequence is to marginalise diplomacy and put the big emphasis on the ability to deliver kinetic force.” Worryingly, “it has been, and is being, successful,” he adds.

The former security figure echoes this concern. “There’s a really big story to be written about the military–industrial complex in Australia,” he says. “There are a lot of very powerful companies which have a vested interest in the defence area, and are therefore willing to put money into supporting the sorts of things that ASPI has done. Therefore ASPI has a vested interest in making its stakeholders and donors happy. There’s no equivalent in the foreign policy area.”

According to ASPI, nearly 40 per cent of its $11 million annual budget comes from the Department of Defence and another 25 per cent from various federal departments and agencies. Foreign government agencies in the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Japan chipped in nearly $2 million, or 18 per cent, in 2020–21.

Defence contractors like BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rafael and Thales contributed just $316,000, or 3 per cent of the ASPI budget — small change for them, and a bargain if ASPI does in fact influence spending on weapons deals such as the F-35s, submarines, frigates and armoured vehicles each worth tens of billions of dollars.

John Blaxland, professor of international security and intelligence studies at ANU, is one who disagrees that the sources of funding have called ASPI’s tune. At times, he says, its analysts have directly criticised what donors have been doing.

For an outfit of some thirty analysts and twenty support staff working mostly from open-source material, ASPI has an outsize voice. That’s largely the legacy of its longest-serving executive director, Peter Jennings, another former defence deputy secretary, who ended his ten years leading ASPI earlier this year. That decade roughly matched Xi Jinping’s first two terms as China’s supreme leader.

As Xi moved from the sweet-sounding goal of realising the “China Dream” through his Belt and Road Initiative to displays of military power, Jennings’s warnings became louder. ASPI and Jennings were quick to point to danger from China and ready to provide a quick quote to this effect for press gallery defence and foreign affairs correspondents. As one China specialist puts it, “He was kind of like driving around Canberra with a police siren on every day, yelling, ‘China! China!’”

Sometimes Jennings jumped the gun or ignored contrary evidence. He quickly blamed the crash of the Australian census computer system in 2016 on a Chinese cyberattack, but post-mortems found it was just an overload. When a proposed Chinese-built wharf in Luganville, Vanuatu, was played up as a base for the Chinese navy, the Vanuatu government’s insistence that its non-alignment forbade any foreign military bases was disregarded.

It was almost as if Jennings was leading a sort of backlash against the whole idea of diplomacy. The field of international relations has traditionally been a conservative one, respectful of government and diplomacy, as Rodney Tiffen, emeritus professor of government at the University of Sydney, points out. “Now there is a sort of counter-establishment, or new establishment, against the old Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade approach.”

Jennings declined to be interviewed for this article, saying any comments should be left to his successor. And, to be fair, he wasn’t the only contributor to rising public and government concern about Chinese power and influence. In 2016–17, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and his own national security officials look for evidence of Chinese subversion and influence buying. Tighter laws on foreign lobbying and political funding resulted.

In an interview in 2019 after five years as ASIO director-general, Duncan Lewis warned about the risk of “insidious” espionage and interference. “You wake up one day and find decisions made in our country that are not in the interests of our country,” he said.

The academic Clive Hamilton also added to the fevered atmosphere in two books that painted Australia as already deeply penetrated by Chinese spies and political manipulators. News Corp newspapers provided an eager forum for this kind of “disclosure,” and some Fairfax and ABC investigative journalists named prominent business figures as instruments of the Chinese Communist Party, in one case resulting in a large defamation payout.

As well as deriding DFAT and specialist academics for clinging to hopes that Beijing would converge politically with the West, the hardline China critics attacked business leaders. Their sin was to try to stop trade being further damaged after the $20 billion worth of retaliation for Scott Morrison’s switch to “calling out” and “pushing back” against China in 2020.

That year the business-supported Sydney think tank China Matters lost funding from several federal departments and had its tax-deductible status removed. News Corp tabloids obliged by accusing it of lobbying against Australia’s interests. “Advocacy of ongoing engagement with the PRC does not make one a stooge of the Communist Party of China or an agent of influence,” protested its chair, former Macquarie Bank chief Kevin McCann. But the punishment remains, crippling this alternative voice.

While saying he sometimes disagrees strongly with what comes out of ASPI, the ANU’s Blaxland says its stance on China was probably consistent with a consensus among “insiders” briefed on the “aggressive and industrial scale of Chinese attempts at foreign interference.”

“Successive prime ministers, once they’ve been briefed on it, change their tune,” Blaxland says. “Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, who was the most dovish, and not just Scott Morrison but now Anthony Albanese.”

The big question, says Blaxland, is how you respond to the challenge. “Do you beat the drumbeats of war or do you speak more softly and try and carry a bigger stick, which is what I would recommend. Let’s be careful about what we say.” The answer should not involve muffling or defunding ASPI, “which has done a public service by provoking a necessary and vigorous national debate. Let’s fund more bodies: AsiaLink, the Australia Institute, China Matters.”

Ahead of the recent federal election, Morrison’s defence minister, Peter Dutton, took steps to keep ASPI on the path set by Jennings. New appointments to the ASPI council included former Coalition ministers John Anderson and Michael Keenan, cybersecurity business figure Rachael Falk, and former army officer Catherine McGregor. Then, in this year’s budget, the Coalition granted ASPI $5 million in extra funding over two years to open a branch in Washington, a move that has baffled or infuriated many informed observers.

ASPI is about contributing to the Australian defence debate, not the American one, says Hugh White. “To the extent that ASPI’s role in Washington is simply to convince Americans that everyone on this side of the Pacific agrees with them, which they don’t, then they’re doing both us and the Americans a disservice.”

Adding to the puzzle is the fact that Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies had just set up its own Australia chair, under Charles Edel, a Yale-educated long-time think-tanker who has written extensively on foreign policy and security and has been a guest scholar at Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre. And that’s not to mention that Australia has one of its biggest embassies in Washington. Could not the $5 million have gone to research in places like Tokyo, Singapore, Jakarta and New Delhi?

Dutton also vetoed the new executive director proposed by a search panel of ASPI council members, former defence minister Brendan Nelson and former federal Labor MP Gai Brodtmann. Its preferred candidate was Michael Shoebridge, a former defence official who had long directed ASPI’s research covering defence, strategy and national security — its traditional focus.

Instead Dutton appointed Justin Bassi, chief of staff in the office of Marise Payne, Morrison’s foreign minister. Bassi had earlier been a national security adviser to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and, further back, to attorney-general George Brandis. His career in the public service started in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Office of National Assessments, or ONA (now the larger Office of National Intelligence).

Some think Bassi’s experience rather narrow for the role he has taken on. He has mainly focused on cybersecurity and domestic threats, hasn’t run any organisation larger than a ministerial office or a small ONA section, and hasn’t done anything much in the public domain.

His credentials as a security and China hawk are impeccable, however. On Turnbull’s staff he would have been deeply involved in the investigation of influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. And his job on Payne’s staff, one China-watcher says, was to “ride shotgun,” but until his or Payne’s memoirs are published we may not know for sure.

Payne did take on China during the Covid-19 outbreak with her call for an outside inquiry in April 2020. But three months later, during what is usually an annual bilateral ministerial love-in, she explicitly distanced Australia from harsh attacks on China by her US counterpart, Mike Pompeo.

Justin Bassi declined to speak to me about his plans for ASPI, and didn’t respond to emailed questions. “ASPI doesn’t tend to do interviews on itself, but rather interviews relating to its research on strategic and security issues,” its head of communications, Olivia Nelson, told me.

It is too early to judge how ASPI will fare under Labor, which is yet to reveal whether its bipartisan concurrence with nearly every defence and foreign policy step of the previous government was tactical — in an effort to avoid being wedged — or reflected genuine accord.

If there is pushback against the defence–security mindset, it will come from foreign minister Penny Wong, who has been active on the ground in the near regions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. Signs of a reorientation of China policy include the appointment of former Beijing and Tokyo ambassador Jan Adams as secretary of DFAT, replacing the non-diplomat and part-time army general Kathryn Campbell, who was installed by Scott Morrison in August 2021. Joining Wong’s staff are DFAT officers with intelligence assessment experience, along with Natasha Kassam, a Mandarin speaker who has served in Australia’s Beijing embassy and was until recently a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute.

Wong’s office will have a receptive ear in the prime minister’s office. The new national security adviser, Philippa Brant, is a Mandarin speaker with a China-related doctorate who has worked with Wong; and Anthony Albanese’s new foreign policy adviser, Kathy Klugman, comes from DFAT.

Publicly, Wong is taking a quiet approach. But according to the Australian’s Ben Packham, she told DFAT staff a month ago, “I am asking you to help me bring DFAT back to the centre of the Australian government.” Later, in an interview with former ONA chief Allan Gyngell, national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, she indicated ambitions for a stronger DFAT voice in government. “The levers of state power have not been accorded equal value,” she said.

For the moment, many China hawks remain in place in Canberra. Andrew Shearer is still director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, and accompanied Albanese on his first foreign foray, a meeting of Quad leaders in Tokyo.

And so far, according to Packham, ASPI’s main paymaster is happy with it, and with Bassi. The first foreign trip by the new defence minister, Richard Marles, was to Washington, where he opened the new ASPI office, spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and attended the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a closed-door gathering of official and private-sector ANZUS alliance worshippers. Marles astonished many defence analysts by going beyond the doctrine of “interoperability” to declare Australia’s forces should be “interchangeable” with those of the United States.

Back in Canberra, the new defence minister held a teleconference with twenty-five selected experts in defence and security fields, each given a few minutes to talk about what they saw as the most pressing issue. “No one who spoke at that meeting seriously contested the principles upon which the present government and their predecessors are approaching Australia’s strategic circumstances,” says Hugh White, who was one of the invited, though didn’t himself speak. Another participant said the general theme was the “urgency” of building up the defence forces, and improving equipment and munition procurement.

Nor has the appointment of two notably cautious figures — former Labor foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence force and air force chief Angus Houston — to conduct a review of defence policy inspired hopes of a contest of ideas. From hints given at a recent defence conference in Perth, the pair will recommend more of the same, including more F-35 fighters.

Bassi, meanwhile, has many things to master in his new job. His installation has been deeply unsettling at the institute. Despite being elevated to deputy director, Shoebridge has resigned and circulated a barbed email to his colleagues.

Some see a bifurcation under way at the institute, with its International Cyber Policy Centre, directed by Fergus Hanson, employing more analysts than the traditional defence and national security wing, and eclipsing it somewhat in research output.

Overall, though, Bassi seems happy with the trend in Canberra. In one of his earliest writings as ASPI head, for the Australian Financial Review, he praised the new government for maintaining Coalition policy on Huawei and the 5G network, AUKUS and the Quad, for standing with other small and medium countries against Chinese “coercion,” and for not having “compromised” any foreign policy, national security or defence settings for the sake of dialogue with China. Nor, he wrote, should the bar be lowered for China to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade and investment pact. For ASPI’s new head, the Albanese government has got off to a splendid start. •

The post Diplomacy on the defensive appeared first on Inside Story.

Melbourne University’s Michael Wesley goes through some of this history in his lead essay for Australian Foreign Affairs. He shows Australia clinging to its diminishing status in London as one of the “white dominions” and then falling in with the United States in its suspicion of India’s Soviet ties and sanctions over its nuclear tests — before having to play catch-up when Washington, London and Paris decided a nuclear Indian superpower was needed.

Wesley points out the dilemma for Canberra. “Its foreign policy has tended to be ‘heliocentric’ — the major elements of its statecraft are shaped by its commitment to a single major ally,” he writes. That single ally — first Britain, then the United States — has always been culturally similar. “Heliocentrism has enshrined a presidential element to policy formulation, with the prime minister taking personal charge of relations with the major ally. It has also resulted in Australia looking at the world from the same perspective as a global power, rather than as an isolated country with limited capabilities.”

Hence our expectation to be heard in global councils, our willingness to join military expeditions, and our past contempt for Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned foreign policy. In return, we drew contempt from New Delhi’s external affairs ministry, its suspicion of America only recently fading, as the monkey to the Washington organ-grinder.

This heliocentrism is now deeply challenged, says Wesley. “The US investment in a relationship with India signals an admission that America has neither the capacity nor the stomach to face China alone. Washington has ceded its pre-eminence in the Pacific to an order in which China and the United States become two among a series of great powers — including Indonesia and Japan — seeking to prevent any single state from dominating the region.”

This shift has clearly not yet sunk in among Canberra foreign policymakers. Our diplomats and security analysts are still pushing for India to stop acquiring Russian-supplied armaments and buy American in the name of “interoperability” with the other Quad members. With New Delhi proceeding with the purchase of the powerful S-400 air defence system from Russia in spite of threatened US sanctions — a similar purchase got NATO ally Turkey barred from the F-35 fighter program — Canberra will be put in an awkward spot if neither partner backs down.

India is unlikely to transform into another dutiful US ally like Japan and Australia. But it would help us adjust out of heliocentrism if India displays the kind of kindred liberal democratic and free-market values cited by exponents of a closer embrace.

Will it? Indian journalist Debasish Roy Chowdhury and Sydney University political scientist John Keane offer a dismaying portrait of neglect and institutional decay. The world’s “biggest democracy” is an “endangered” one in its “death stages,” characterised by dark money, manipulated media and muscle power, its people at risk from toxic air, poisoned water, and (as Covid has shown) disease.

The authors of To Kill a Democracy believe the seeds of decay were planted soon after independence when Nehru echoed the 1835 advice of Thomas Babington Macaulay that higher education for the upper classes was more useful than basic education for the masses. In Nehru’s case, he wanted brains to run the institutions of state and his new industrial “temples of modernity.”

That neglect has left India with an employment gap between agriculture and the booming but relatively low-labour services sector. A huge pool of jobless young has been waiting for a demagogue like Narendra Modi to enlist them as stormtroopers in a quest to turn the secular Indian state into a Hindu one.

A first-past-the-post electoral system allowed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to translate a 37 per cent vote into an absolute majority of seats. With anti-defection laws reducing MPs to ciphers, cabinet cowed and civil servants at risk of transfer to remote posts, Modi and his authoritarian home minister Amit Shah are the government. That makes for decisive but sometimes disastrous decisions, as when Modi suddenly “de-monetised” large-value banknotes in 2016 in an effort to flush out the black economy. Representing 86 per of cash in circulation in an economy overwhelmingly reliant on cash transactions, the move paralysed the economy.

The book’s most dispiriting passage concerns the abject complicity of the widely respected Supreme Court of India, under former chief justice Ranjan Gogoi, in Modi’s manoeuvres against Muslims, notably his overnight abolition of Kashmir’s autonomous statehood and his National Register of Citizens, which was used to remove citizenship from some 1.9 million Muslims in Assam.

All this has been played down by Quad enthusiasts. Modi has had a warm rapport with Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump. As Wesley writes, “There are elements of his populist political style and can-do approach to governance that appeal to conservative leaders, who are more likely to overlook his government’s chauvinistic approach to communal relations at home.”

Fortunately, Australia’s Indian diaspora seems to be bringing the best of India with them, eager for space, a clean environment and less competition for jobs. Aarti Betigeri, a journalist living in Australia, writes a stand-out essay for India Rising? from inside this diaspora, which is, or soon will be, our biggest new migrant cohort and one that is moving rapidly up the echelons of our institutions and companies — though not yet in politics, as its numbers would suggest, because it associates in divergent language, caste and other interest groups.

Betigeri believes the hunger to migrate has been thoroughly exploited by Australia:

We have set the intake pipeline so that it benefits Australia at every stage. First, students pay huge sums of money to study here (usually it’s their parents’ life savings, or land is sold to finance the fees). Then, while they’re studying, they provide a cheap, readily available and compliant source of unskilled labour. After graduation, they take on unpaid internships of three to six months, living off their savings, or fitting in overnight shifts at the servo to pay the rent. Then they emerge, fully trained, with an Australian education, ready to join the workforce, fuelling our economic growth. At every stage, the benefits are stacked in Australia’s favour. The house always wins.

The ever-higher bar of Home Affairs criteria for converting temporary residence into citizenship is another grievance. The Morrison government’s treatment of foreign students during the pandemic — go home or fend for yourselves — and its ban on flights from India at the height of the Delta variant panic have hardly improved Australia’s external image.

That adverse perceptions are prone to persist is shown in Harsh V. Pant’s essay for India Rising? on the view of Australia from India. He opens by recalling the wave of attacks on Indian students in Sydney and Melbourne in 2009–10, which he accepts as mostly racially motivated and epitomising a “social and political gap” between India and Australia. But street-level enquiries by Indian diplomats revealed that nearly all the attacks were made by disadvantaged teenagers set on stealing mobile phones and bling from relatively well-off students in the outer suburbs to which they had been dispersed by the gentrification of old inner-city student quarters,.

From New Delhi, Amit Dasgupta, the Indian consul-general in Sydney at the time, tells me, “I had said then and maintain even now that, with the exception of a few, the majority of the attacks were not racist and to allege them as such is incorrect.” That even Pant, a professor in international relations at King’s College, London, is still swayed by the hyped-up “news” generated by India’s hectic new electronic channels and websites illustrates the dangers of a debased media that has only flourished and become more chauvinist under Modi.

Such is the degree of intimidation that Oxford University Press has opted out of producing a cheaper edition of the Roy Chowdhury and Keane book for the Indian market. This followed a warning in the journal of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the militant Hindu-nationalist movement from which Modi sprang.

While the strategic partnership between Australia and India won’t follow the US alliance model, economic ties seem likely to grow steadily, and an essay about this would have rounded out this issue of Australian Foreign Affairs. The Morrison government is again talking up the free-trade agreement shelved soon after Abbott and Modi announced talks. This is again raising unrealistic hopes.

As Peter Varghese, author of An India Economic Strategy to 2035 for the Australian government, put it to me earlier this year, India is “deeply protectionist and unlikely to fundamentally change.” He says India is an “investment story” requiring Australian businesses to get in behind India’s protective barriers and develop a domestic business — a big call for Australia’s parochial and short term–minded business community. “I think it would be a mistake to overinvest in getting a free-trade agreement done because it will just distract the relationship for a considerable period of time with a limited prospect of success,” Varghese said. “And there’s a heck of a lot of things you can do without an FTA.”

On the shared values front, the old secular India may be pushing back. As Roy Chowdhury and Keane admit, India may still have the world’s largest pool of illiterates, but adult literacy grew from 12 per cent in 1947 to 74 per cent in the latest census, in 2011. Mobile phones and the internet have empowered and enlightened, as well as being channels for bigotry and porn. Political cultures in the non-Hindi language states and lower-caste mobilisation also stand in Modi’s way: in the important West Bengal state elections this year, the fiery chief minister and leader of a Congress Party splinter, Mamata Banerjee, roundly beat Modi’s BJP.

The Supreme Court may also be regaining its nerve under a new chief justice. This year it accepted public interest litigation from a group of Modi critics who found their mobile phones infected by Israeli spyware available only to governments. The court rejected the government’s attempt to assert national-interest secrecy, and set up its own independent commission to investigate.

And this month, Modi abruptly announced the withdrawal of his new agricultural laws that would have ditched guaranteed prices and government purchases of major crops, and left individual farmers to deal directly with emerging giant retail chains. Until suspended by the Supreme Court in January, the laws drew a blockade of New Delhi by farmers and their tractors. Over 600 died in clashes with police, as Modi’s spokespeople called the protesters “traitors” and “terrorists.”

With state elections approaching in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, from where many of the protesting farmers came, the Indian prime minister is backing off. Perhaps we have seen peak Modi. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Can-do communalism appeared first on Inside Story.

Thanks largely to the political turmoil and a drought caused by two successive La Niña weather patterns, the World Food Programme says that 22.8 million of Afghanistan’s thirty-nine million people are short of food, with 8.7 million at “emergency levels” of hunger. Fast approaching is the country’s bitter winter, when nothing grows and many villages are cut off from the outside world.

On top of this, nearly 700,000 people have been displaced this year by the conflict. The financial system has little money to dispense; doctors are unpaid and medicines are running out. Families are selling possessions to raise cash for food, some even offering their infant daughters for between $200 and $500 as future brides. The Taliban took power entirely unprepared for government.

“Afghanistan is under immense stress,” says the WFP’s Shelley Thakral. “By some estimates 2022 may be the year in which we witness near universal poverty in Afghanistan.”

The Australian Council for International Development’s Tim Watkin told a Senate inquiry on Monday that “Afghanistan is at a high risk of state collapse.” More extreme suffering seems inevitable, as does regional instability, an increased risk of terrorism and a renewed refugee crisis. “It would bring huge security risks for Australia,” said Watkin.

While geopolitical manoeuvring and concern about terrorism are hampering the WFP’s massive attempt to fund and organise relief, the Taliban is trying to leverage diplomatic recognition from its cooperation with aid efforts. But even the surrounding powers, with fewer scruples about the Taliban’s fundamentalist ideology — let alone Western countries — are holding back from recognising the new regime.

Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and Qatar initially demanded early recognition of the Taliban government, says Lahore-based analyst Ahmed Rashid, author of acclaimed studies of the Taliban. But now they seemed to have “cooled down.” Partly, says Rashid, this reflects the Taliban’s failure to engage with neighbouring countries. And it would be awkward, “especially for the respectable states like Qatar,” to annoy the Americans by hastily recognising the new government. “What is happening now is a rolling back of this bloc of five countries who were ready to recognise and are now hesitant.”

Most of these countries still have embassies in Kabul, but Rashid says this doesn’t amount to recognition. “These embassies are basically involved in helping their compatriots leave the country,” he says. “The airlift continues. Americans are still there — they’ve got three or four hundred Americans they’re trying to get out, including people out in the boonies they’re trying to get into Kabul.”

Pakistan, whose Inter-Services Intelligence agency was the sorcerer training the Taliban apprentice back in the 1990s — with the goal of extending its own influence over Afghanistan — is likely to be caught by the blowback from the Taliban’s success. “There’s been a strong reaction by fundamentalist groups of all sorts, which include the Pakistani Taliban and a variety of other groups who have been very active on the streets,” says Rashid. “The fear is this is going to increase in the weeks and months ahead.”

The Taliban are not making it any easier for the outside world by bringing the extremely violent Haqqani Network into their interim government. The new interior minister, Haqqani leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, is on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “most wanted list” as a “global terrorist” with a US$10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest.

“It’s very much like what the Taliban did in 1996 when they took Kabul,” says Rashid. “They had no clue, nobody training to run a government, no governance, people starving, and they threw out the UN. Much of that is being repeated now. They won’t throw out the internationals — they want international recognition — but recognition is not going to come, unless they really clamp down on terrorism.”

So far, Rashid adds, the Taliban haven’t taken up the measures being demanded by Western countries, the basic one being to eliminate international jihadist terror groups like al Qaeda. “And Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran are all very nervous, because they want early recognition so the Taliban will settle down. It’s been quite amazing that the Haqqanis have been running the negotiations with the foreign forces. That shows you. It’s going to be very difficult for the Americans to strike a deal with the Haqqanis.”

Washington’s response has been to block the release of US$9 billion of Afghan’s foreign reserves held in US institutions and as borrowing entitlements with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, lest it go to the Taliban for non-humanitarian purposes. At the Senate hearing on Monday, aid groups urged Canberra to seek ways of unlocking the reserves via trust funds for relief work.

The WFP and other non-government groups report the Taliban are starting to cooperate to some degree. World Vision’s Patrick Thomas told the Senate committee that permission had come through last week for female staff to take part in the group’s relief operations in four western provinces around Herat.

Even before the fall of Kabul in August, the WFP says it was in contact with the Taliban and had been able to deliver food assistance at the height of the conflict. “The de facto authorities continue to allow WFP to conduct our life-saving work,” said the WFP’s Thakral. With relief convoys coming overland from Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and 170 trucks distributing aid across all thirty-four provinces, “no major issues” were impeding transit.

The agency estimates that US$2.8 billion will be needed in 2022 to reach the nearly twenty-three million Afghans at most risk. “Since August, some governments have stepped up, but money pledged and received to date is a drop in the ocean given the vast scale of humanitarian needs on the horizon,” Thakral said.

In September, the Australian government announced it was giving $65 million to UN agencies for immediate relief operations, with a further $35 million following over the next three years. But it is holding back on any moves that might constitute recognition of the Taliban, despite the longstanding foreign policy convention that Australia recognises states, not regimes, when it comes to opening embassies.

The government decided to close its Kabul embassy on 28 April, not long after US president Joe Biden set a date for withdrawing the remaining US forces. Hundreds of Afghans who had worked for Australia were left to seek visas by complex online form-filling.

Along with the United States and several other Western governments, Canberra maintains informal contact with the Taliban in Qatar, where diplomat Daniel Sloper operates as “special representative on Afghanistan” at the Australian embassy. “This mission is helping to deepen our cooperation with partners, many of whom also moved their missions to Afghanistan from Kabul to Qatar,” the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in its submission to the Senate inquiry.

Ahmed Rashid says this cooperation between Western governments has yet to result in a clear message to the Taliban. “They haven’t spelt it out,” he says. “But clearly their number one focus is to wrap up all these non-Afghan terrorist groups in Afghanistan — kill them, shoot them, imprison them, do what you like, but get rid of them. That includes multiple groups — from Pakistan, Central Asia, and Arabs. Everybody is still there, al Qaeda included.” Then they want the Taliban to deal with Islamic State Khorasan, “which the Taliban would like to do but they don’t seem to be getting done.”

For the West, women’s education and jobs are the other big issue. “My critique of all of this,” says Rashid, “is I don’t think the West has laid it out clearly enough: step by step that the Taliban need to take. If it was clear, then all visitors to the Taliban could make the same points, and you would hopefully get the Taliban to do some of this stuff.”

Such a diplomatic push may be starting. The Biden administration’s new Afghanistan special envoy Thomas West was due in Islamabad yesterday to meet the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, along with Pakistani, Chinese and  Russian officials. West would “make clear the expectations that we have of the Taliban and of any future Afghanistan government,” said the US State Department, while a Pakistani official briefed that the meeting was “primarily aimed at… finding ways to avert a humanitarian crisis and to look into possibilities of setting up an inclusive government in Afghanistan.”

Canberra seems to be waiting for leads from this meeting, and from another hosted by India in New Delhi on Wednesday that was attended by Russia and the Central Asian republics, but not Pakistan or China.

The Senate inquiry is hearing all kinds of submissions about what Australia did in Afghanistan after it joined US president George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” The near twenty-year engagement cost us forty-one soldiers killed, hundreds injured and traumatised, scores of post-service suicides, a continuing war crimes investigation, and some $13.6 billion. And for the United States, of course, and some European allies, the price was much, much higher.

The Australian government would much rather have us focus on military heroics than this debacle. On his way back from his fraught visits to Rome and Glasgow, Scott Morrison stopped off in Dubai for a restorative immersion in khaki, meeting and thanking some of the defence force personnel who, at great risk, extracted 4100 citizens and visa-holders from Kabul’s airport after the city fell to the Taliban.

On the positive side of the ledger was a sharp increase in life expectancy for Afghans; more access to education, including for girls; reduced maternal mortality; and more representation and opportunity for women.

All this is now at risk, which is why few, if any, of the Senate witnesses said the Taliban deserved formal ties yet. “There is a real danger that any steps to accord them recognition at this point would be read by the Taliban as an indicator that they could openly violate important international norms and expect to get away with it,” a quartet of academics — William Maley, Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Nishank Motwani and Srinjoy Bose — told the committee.

And yet the pressing human disaster seems to require contact, which in turn might open channels for persuasion. “The dire situation should compel the separation of politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said WFP spokesperson Thakral. “We understand the concerns of the international community, but delivery of life-saving aid is still possible by channelling funds through humanitarian agencies like WFP. We cannot wait, we need to save lives today.” •

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Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of the software house Atlassian, paid a record $100 million for Fairwater in 2018, and moved in with his young family. Atlassian’s other founder, Scott Farquhar, had already bought the neighbouring house, “Elaine,” which had been owned by Sir Warwick’s cousin and John Fairfax Ltd director Sir Vincent Fairfax, for $71 million.

Where Sir Warwick went to work chauffeur-driven in finely tailored Prince of Wales check suits, in later years favouring mutton-chop sideburns, forty-one-year-old Cannon-Brookes wears jeans, sweatshirts and a peaked canvas cap, has a straggly beard and shoulder-length hair, and takes public transport to work.

The old Fairfax building on Broadway featured different tiers of catering, ranging from an executive dining room for senior managers, editors and directors down to two greasy-spoon canteens, one for white-collar staff and the other for the inky printers. A reserved elevator took Sir Warwick and other directors to the wood-panelled top floor. Otherwise the building was so bleakly utilitarian it was once used as a location for a movie set in Stalin-era Moscow.

Some 300 metres away, Atlassian’s new $546 million headquarters, recently approved by the NSW government as part of the remake of Central railway station, will be a forty-storey concrete, steel and timber structure running on 100 per cent renewable energy. It will feature indoor and outdoor garden terraces where executives and programmers will mingle under a corporate philosophy that declares “no bulls—t” as one of its guiding principles.

The Atlassian story, now a legend, has inspired a generation of internet startups. It began when Cannon-Brookes, a banker’s son who went to the expensive Cranbrook school, not far from where he lives now, and Farquhar, a working-class boy from Sydney’s outer suburbs who won a place at the selective James Ruse high school, met during information technology and science classes at the University of NSW.

On graduating in 2002, they formed Atlassian and began work on a new program called Jira, designed to improve collaborative software development projects and sort out program bugs. They financed the startup with $10,000 drawn on maxed-out credit cards. Jira and other products designed to enhance creative cooperation found ready markets. Two decades later, Microsoft, Oracle and the other top-ten software makers use Atlassian products, as do major global companies including Shell, Toyota, Amazon and Nokia Verizon, and universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale and MIT.

In 2010 the partners raised US$60 million from a big US venture capital fund, and in 2015 they floated Atlassian on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York. It now has a market capitalisation of US$108 billion, making it the 143rd-biggest corporation in the world by that measure, with 6000 employees in Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Japan and India. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar both own 22.7 per cent, making each of them worth US$24.5 billion.

The two partners haven’t just spent big on the finer things in life. They have also been lobbing boulders into the stagnant ponds of Australia’s economy and politics. Belatedly, a decade or so after the United States, tech billionaires are disrupting Australian business, and their firepower is immense.

One of the first inklings came in early 2017 when South Australia suffered a statewide blackout after tens of thousands of lightning strikes and two tornadoes cut power lines. Conservative politicians and journalists pounced, blaming the then Labor state government for relying too much on wind and solar power rather than “stable” coal or gas generators.

Cannon-Brookes picked up on a claim by Tesla’s vice-president for energy products, Lyndon Rive, that his company’s big lithium batteries could fix the state’s energy network in one hundred days. On Twitter, he asked Tesla founder Elon Musk how serious he was. “If I can make the $ happen (& politics),” he asked, “can you guarantee the 100 MW in 100 days?”

“Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free,” Musk tweeted back. “That serious enough for you?”

Musk was derided by then federal treasurer Scott Morrison, who around the same time brandished a lump of coal in parliament to taunt Labor and the Greens. “By all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country,” said the man destined to be prime minister. “But that is not solving the problem.”

The big battery began operating in November that year, some sixty days after an agreement had been signed between Tesla, French renewable firm Neoen, and the SA government. As a backup, it can power 30,000 homes for eight hours, or 60,000 homes for four. As a source of cheap power, it’s estimated to save South Australian consumers about $40 million a year.

The battery’s capacity is currently being doubled, and state governments and power companies around Australia are following its example.

“The way capital has moved much more strongly towards renewables than the Coalition has is fascinating,” says former Australian National University professor of economics Andrew Leigh, now a federal Labor MP. “You can see the tension within the Business Council of Australia and how increasingly renewables are being seen as the sensible way to go.”

Leigh believes that Mike Cannon-Brookes stands out so much because the Australian business landscape has been so static. Aside from pharmaceutical major CSL, he says, the five largest firms on the stock market are the same as they were thirty-five years ago. “You see much more dynamism and flux in the US. The US has completely turned over its top five companies in the last thirty-five years, and the dominance of tech in the share market has been well-established for a decade.”

Business is coming round on climate, though. Leigh reports having very different conversations with business leaders from those he has with his counterparts on the other side of parliament. Coalition MPs, he says, “are caught up in talking about 2050 targets when the conversation in Glasgow is going to be about 2030. They’re still running scare campaigns about electric vehicles ending the weekend. You get a sense when you are talking to businesspeople that they’re excited about what Tesla and others are doing, they’re looking at renewables, they’re aware they have to account to the market on climate emissions. It’s just a very different conversation.”

“It’s a great thing for Australia that Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar have made an absolute fortune,” says Ralph Evans, a former head of the federal government’s Austrade. “There have been venture capital successes before, but much smaller. This is a very big one and it shows it can be done. It will encourage many others.”

Evans cites other examples of emerging firms, notably the Sydney-based graphic design platform Canva, started by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams in Perth eight years ago, which now has 1500 staff and 750,000 customers worldwide, and is valued at US$40 billion.

For Evans, the Atlassian partners reflect the spirit of the San Francisco Bay area. “It’s full of people like Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar,” he says. “They are not going to put up with what they’re told to think by Murdoch or Donald Trump or anybody else like that.”

As well as taking a high-profile position on climate, the company weighs into debates on immigration, arguing for more open transfers of expertise, and IT security, questioning the push by intelligence agencies to compel communications and social media companies to give them “backdoor” access to encrypted data.

But green technology is the subject that has brought Cannon-Brookes out into advocacy — and action. Over the past week, as Morrison dragged his Coalition partners into reluctant agreement on a net zero target for 2050 while sticking with the Abbott government’s target of 28 per cent reduction by 2030, Cannon-Brookes has been spurring action outside the federal government.

He and his wife Annie pledged to invest $1 billion in green technology projects and donate a further $500 million to organisations working on the climate crisis, and promised that Atlassian itself would be a net zero operation by 2040. He says the 2050 target cited by Morrison as a historic moment was already a “done deal” for most of the advanced economies, with ambitious 2030 targets now far more important.

His latest commitments come on top of some $1 billion that Cannon-Brookes has put into green energy ventures. One is a company called Sun Cable, with offices in Singapore, Darwin and Sydney, started by partners David Griffin, Mac Thompson and Fraser Thompson. It was seed-funded by Cannon-Brookes’s private investment firm, Grok Ventures, alongside iron ore magnate Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy and others.

On 20 October, as the Nationals caucus was still chewing the grass stalks on net zero, Sun Cable announced that a raft of important global firms, including engineering giants Bechtel, Hatch and SMEC, were joining its $30 billion project to take solar power from northern Australia to Singapore.

The project involves some 125 square kilometres of solar arrays in the Simpson Desert, connected to Darwin by an 800 kilometre cable, and then undersea to Singapore by a 4200 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable. The project is designed to supply 15 per cent of the island republic’s electricity and cut emissions by enough for it to reach its 2030 abatement target. Construction is planned to start in 2023, with completion in 2028, when it is expected to generate about $2 billion a year in earnings for Australia.

It’s a big test of the cable transmission technology. The most ambitious example so far is an 800 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable between Norway and Britain, with shorter ones from offshore windfarms to European centres. But a solar-cable project over a similarly ambitious distance is proposed to link solar arrays in Morocco with Britain.

Iain MacGill, a UNSW associate professor of electrical engineering who has collaborated with Sun Cable, says the project is “technically leading edge” in its combination of terminal configuration, distance, power transfer capacity, and water depth. “There are other HVDC links that collectively do most of these things (except that distance), but not all together,” he says.

“The commercial challenges and risks are likely the most important in terms of the project being implemented,” MacGill goes on. “However, the commercial opportunity is also extremely attractive given Singapore’s current reliance on gas generation, limited local renewable energy options, and plans to increase their use of renewables and reduce emissions.”

Another big renewables scheme, the solar-and-wind Asian Renewable Energy Hub proposed for northwest Australia, has switched from HVDC energy exports to green hydrogen and now green ammonia. Ralph Evans notes that Singapore is already building floating solar arrays in its own backwaters, and could find larger floating arrays in nearby Indonesian waters a cheaper proposition than the distant Australian source.

Somewhat ironically, Scott Morrison has found himself part of the marketing for Sun Cable, pushing its merits to his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong on a stopover to the G7 summit earlier  this year. Australia’s ambassador in Jakarta, Penny Williams, also worked to gain the Indonesian government’s approval for the undersea cabling, announced last month, with the project pledging $2 billion in technology transfers to Indonesian institutions.

After these latest announcements, Cannon-Brookes said Sun Cable could be just the start of renewable energy exports, and Australia should be thinking of a “500 per cent” renewables target.

“Every step forward puts the naysayers further in the rear-view mirror,” he tweeted. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Shum loses US$100,000 in a game called Kill the Landlord, but that’s okay — it’s a good investment in connections. As the drink flows, Ningbo tycoon Yu Guoxiang boasts of the official favours that enabled his expressway and hotel deals.

Once they arrive, museums and art galleries aren’t on the itinerary. David Li, son-in-law of Chinese Communist Party heavy Jia Qinglin, wants to open an exclusive wine club in Beijing, so first there’s a dinner at the Pavillon Ledoyen in Paris, where the wine-tasting alone costs US$100,000, and then it’s on to a Rothschild estate in Bordeaux.

Next stop is the Côte d’Azur, where Xu Jiayin, the ex-steelworker who founded Evergrande — the property group whose US$300 billion–plus in unpayable debt is currently causing China systemic risk — wants to check out a yacht that might work well as a floating palace for entertaining contacts away from snoops. He looks over one being sold by a Hong Kong businessman, but even at US$100 million it’s not dripping with enough luxurious fittings for the purpose.

Then on to Milan, where the wives go crazy with top Italian brands. They do so much shopping that getting their value-added tax refunds delays the return flight by three hours, though it’s unclear why they are bothered with such small change.

The trip is just one episode in Shum’s tell-all account of his days as entrepreneur and fixer. Red Roulette is a mind-boggling window into the era of breakneck economic growth and excess that the enigmatic Xi Jinping would start shutting down eighteen months after the European expedition following his ascension to the pinnacle of power in China.

Shum’s book recalls, though with much less intimate detail, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994) by Li Zhisui, the personal physician to Mao Zedong. It also has a tinge of Mr China (2005) by British investment banker Tim Clissold, which recounted how, during China’s early switch to private enterprise, some of his clients found their ex-managers opening factories down the road making copies of their products.

Educated in Hong Kong and the United States after his parents got out of Shanghai, Shum was recruited by an American investment fund anxious to put money into Chinese startups. “I quickly learned that in China all rules were bendable as long as you had what we Chinese called guanxi, or a connection into the system,” he writes. “And given that the state changed the rules all the time, no one gave the rules much weight.”

One client was importing Heineken beer in massive quantities into Hong Kong, to be smuggled onto the mainland by various parties including the Chinese navy. Shum’s employers pretended ignorance of this and other transgressions. “A lot of Western businesses in China adopted a similar, don’t ask don’t tell business model,” he writes. “Abysmal working conditions in factories making high-end sneakers? ‘Who knew?’ Prison labour making blue jeans? ‘There must be a mistake.’ In business with the army or the police? ‘We weren’t aware.’”

Shifting to Beijing in 1997, Shum found foreign firms playing a higher-stakes game, using the offspring of high-ranking Chinese officials to gain favour. “These sons and daughters functioned like an aristocracy; they intermarried, lived lives disconnected from those of the average Chinese, and made fortunes selling access to their parents, inside information, and regulatory approvals that were keys to wealth.”

He got close to Jiang Minsheng, son of party general secretary Jiang Zemin, who was rolling out fibre-optic cable. One associate proved less reliable, marrying a granddaughter of previous supreme leader Deng Xiaoping and driving around Beijing in a red Rolls-Royce convertible with military numberplates — a bit too ostentatious, even for the red aristocracy. Other relatives of Deng got deals like supplying bottled Tibetan spring water to China’s high-speed rail network.

It was during those heady times that Shum got to know Whitney Duan, a woman from Shandong province who had parlayed a brilliant computer science degree into a job as assistant to the head of a People’s Liberation Army real estate firm, then branched out to selling IBM equipment to telecom companies and developing land owned by a state shipping company.

Whitney took Shum to be vetted by a mysterious older woman who turned out to be Zhang Peili, wife of vice-premier Wen Jiabao, who was on the verge of becoming premier. A trained geologist like Wen, she’d gained an interest in business via gemstones. Desmond passed the test, and he and Whitney married.

By then Whitney and “Aunty Zhang” were business partners sharing an office in a sought-after tower on the understanding that Zhang would get 30 per cent of Whitney’s profits. Famously nerdy and workaholic, Wen saw nothing of this, not even recognising the expensive rocks and US$10,000 Hermès handbags flashed by his wife.

Big breaks followed, including the well-timed acquisition of a 3 per cent stake in the insurance giant Ping An from the state shipping line, COSCO, that eventually turned a US$12 million investment into US$200 million for Whitney and Desmond.

The couple pushed for a new cargo hub to be attached to Beijing’s airport, which was being expanded for the 2008 Olympics. Airport chief Li Peiying and Sun Zhengcai, party secretary in neighbouring Shunyi district, were cultivated for their support, as were lots of underlings. Gifts included US$10,000 golf club sets and US$15,000 watches.

One of their employees took officials to bathhouses so many times his skin started peeling. The airport customs office demanded and got a US$50 million staff centre, and the quarantine office something similar. On a “study tour” to Los Angeles, an official collapsed, requiring a US$300,000 triple bypass, which Shum funded.

This kind of behaviour was essential, says Shum, “in a system where the rules regarding what was legal and what was proscribed were full of vast areas of grey and every time you wanted to accomplish something you had to wade into the grey.”

It was an intoxicating time for businesses with links to the red aristocracy. “In the 1990s, China’s well-off bought knock-offs,” Shum says. “In the 2000s, we bought the real thing — LV, Prada, Gucci, and Armani.” Whitney spent US$15 million on a pink diamond and US$5 million on a painting, She paid a big import duty bill for a Rolls-Royce, and gave Shum a half-million-dollar Swiss watch for his birthday that F.P. Journe had taken two years to craft. (It was seventh in a series, of which Vladimir Putin was reputedly given the second.)

It could be hard going, though, and risky. Sun Zhengcai moved on, and Li Peiying, who had no party ancestry, was arrested and eventually executed for corruption. “Red aristocrats got a prison sentence; commoners got a bullet in the head,” says Shum. Funding from state banks dried up. Whitney and Desmond had to kick in some of their Ping An profits to complete the airport project. Faced with bureaucratic niggling from Li’s replacements, the couple found a buyer for their stake, abandoning the idea of further airport logistics centres.

“I began to understand what some of my entrepreneur friends had been telling me all along: the smart way to do business in China was to build something, sell it, take money off the table, and go back in,” Shum says. If you stayed in, you could lose it all.

“Two thirds of the people on China’s one hundred wealthiest list would be replaced every year due to poor business decisions, criminality, and/or politically motivated prosecutions, or because they’d mistakenly aligned themselves with a Party faction that had lost its pull,” Shum adds, noting that “anyone running a sizable business was bound to be violating some law.”

By this time, it was widely believed that China would become more open and transparent once private enterprise came to dominate the economy. Indeed, in the early decades of the capitalist experiment, Communist Party thinkers were looking at Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and Singapore’s People’s Action Party as models for one-party elected rule in perpetuity.

But the global financial crisis convinced party leaders that China had the right model after all. With Wen Jiabao’s term as premier coming to an end in early 2013, Whitney and Desmond thought they had a new patron emerging in Sun Zhengcai, the old party secretary in Shunyi, who had risen rapidly from mayor of Beijing to minister of agriculture, with membership of the Politburo standing committee to follow.

The top-level intrigue turned truly nasty with the approach of the 2012 five-yearly party congress, where the succession would be decided. The ambitious Bo Xilai, another red aristocrat, used his fiefdom in the vast Chongqing conurbation to promote himself via a campaign of Mao-era nostalgia. But his plan began to come unstuck when the British business fixer Neil Heywood, who was close to his wife, was found dead in a hotel room in November 2011. Three months later, the city police chief informed Bo that his wife had poisoned Heywood. Bo was enraged, and the police chief fled to the US consulate in nearby Chengdu; giving himself up to State Security not long after, he was taken to Beijing to tell his story.

According to Aunty Zhang’s account, says Shum, the scandal came to the Politburo standing committee in March. Zhou Yongkang, the powerful member supervising security agencies, argued that investigation should stop with the police chief, whose running to the Americans he considered the real offence.

Xi Jinping, still a relatively junior committee member, argued that all players in the affair should be pursued. Wen Jiabao backed Xi’s view, and in September 2012 Bo Xilai was sentenced to life imprisonment, putting him safely out of Xi’s way before the party congress.

Shum has since confirmed to the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor that this account came from Zhang, who would have heard it from Wen. If so, it is the first account of cut-and-thrust inside the Politburo standing committee, so far a black box for sinologists.

Dirt was meanwhile being thrown in all directions. In June that year, Bloomberg reported that Xi’s family had a billion dollars’ worth of assets. In October, the New York Times estimated Wen Jiabao’s family members held an estimated US$3 billion in assets. Aunty Zhang told Whitney the revelations had been fed to the newspaper by Bo.

The double whammy from the two American outlets enabled the victims to argue that the bad publicity was a foreign plot. The party closed ranks, and Xi’s and Wen’s families were encouraged to “donate” their wealth to the state. Whitney agreed to declare that Zhang’s wealth was actually hers. “She willingly became the fall girl to prove that Aunty Zhang had been right to trust her for all these years,” Shum says. Wen wanted to divorce Zhang and become a Buddhist monk: the party vetoed both moves.

Amid all this, Whitney and Desmond pursued a new project, the redevelopment of a rundown state hotel site in Beijing’s fashionable Chaoyang. Two office towers were built, together with a Bulgari hotel and apartment building designed by New York’s Kohn Pedersen Fox and a museum by Tadao Ando. The couple occupied a penthouse in this US$2.5 billion “Genesis Beijing” complex.

But they had become estranged, and after they divorced in 2014 Shum moved to Britain with their son. Their post–Wen Jiabao ally, Sun Zhengcai, had run into his own problems under Xi. Shifted to Chongqing to replace Bo Xilai, he was found to have not done enough to eradicate Bo’s influence, and an investigation for corruption followed. Purged from the standing committee, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 2018.

By then, Whitney’s problems had deepened in tandem with Sun’s. On 5 September 2017, after telling Desmond earlier in the year that she had been banned from leaving China, she disappeared from her office at Genesis Beijing, along with two executives and a personal aide. Shum wasn’t to hear from her for four years.

The silence was broken last month, shortly before Red Roulette’s release, when she telephoned Shum to implore him to stop its publication. Implying that their son might be at risk, she seemed to be reading from a script under duress.

Amid all the colour and movement of Shum’s account of those years, one central mystery remains: what did Xi Jinping have that his rivals for the top job lacked? He was consistently underestimated on his way up, says Shum, despite having made a mark by cleaning up corruption in coastal industrial domains (though selectively, like his later campaign as leader). The consensus among business contacts in those regions was that “he wasn’t even borderline talented.”

The couple’s only contact with Xi came when Aunty Zhang and Whitney had dinner with the future president and his wife, the glamorous People’s Liberation Army chanteuse Peng Liyuan. According to Whitney, Xi let his wife do the talking. “He sat looking a bit uncomfortable, cracking an awkward smile.” No rapport was established. But Xi often looks awkward, particularly posing with foreigners, when he often looks away from the camera. And he may well have been unaccustomed to being surrounded by women.

Since then, the idea that Xi was “signalling left to turn right” has been steadily dispelled by his moves to centralise power around himself, extend his tenure indefinitely, and elevate his ideological status close to that of Mao. Extreme wealth and celebrity is now decidedly out of fashion.

It remains to be seen whether the legacy of that wild period of growth — Evergrande’s debt, and some ninety million empty apartment dwellings — along with the country’s dire demography and his own crackdown on the most vibrant forms of private enterprise, will bring Xi’s dreams of rising Chinese power down to earth. •

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No such meltdown is known to have occurred among the navies that have operated nuclear-powered submarines over the past sixty-five years, not even aboard the USS Thresher, which was lost with all hands during deep-diving tests in 1963. Even so, a lot of public reassurance will be needed following Scott Morrison’s joint announcement with US president Joe Biden and British PM Boris Johnson that nuclear-powered submarines will be built and maintained by the Australian Submarine Corporation, or ASC, at Osborne, just outside Adelaide.

As independent senator Rex Patrick, a former submariner himself, points out, this means “nuclear reactors sitting on hard-stands at Osborne and moored in the Port River.”

American and British nuclear submarines are understood to use highly enriched uranium fuel that is close to bomb grade. With only one small nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights near Sydney, used for making medical and industrial isotopes, Australia will need to have made a big investment in nuclear expertise by the time these submarines arrive.

Morrison’s surprise decision to dump Australia’s commitment to twelve diesel-electric submarines designed by France’s Naval Group in favour of eight US or British nuclear-powered vessels is still being analysed and debated. But one thing is clear. “This is a strategic decision, not a commercial one,” says Steve Ludlam, a former managing director of ASC and, before that, head of Rolls-Royce’s program of modernising Britain’s submarines.

No one is hiding the fact that the new Australian–UK–US technology agreement, AUKUS — which also includes cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other frontier science — is about facing up to China, although none of the three leaders mentioned the fact at this week’s announcement.

“If there was any doubt about what Australia would do in an armed conflict between the US and China over Taiwan or the South China Sea, that’s now gone,” Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on Friday. “The US doesn’t provide you with the crown jewels of its military technology if you are not going to use them when it calls for help.”

But we would have been expected to sign up anyway. It is a popular misconception that the navy needs these nuclear submarines to help out in Northeast Asia. Its existing Collins-class boats, and the Oberon-class before them, have operated in that region. Silent conventional submarines like the Collins-class and India’s and Vietnam’s Russian Kilo-class are said to have successfully stalked and “sunk” US nuclear submarines and major surface ships in exercises.

As Canberra strategist Hugh White points out, for the money likely to be spent on the nuclear submarines — exceeding the $90 billion price tag on the twelve French vessels — the navy could have got twenty-four smaller conventional submarines suited to defence of Australia. The twenty-four ultra-quiet subs could also be deployed further afield with replenishment from bases like Singapore, Guam or Japan’s Sasebo.

The latest British and US nuclear submarines benefit from pump-jet propulsion rather than propellers, quieter engines and battery power for lurking, though, and are big enough and powerful enough to carry autonomous underwater vehicles and other new weapons.

Regardless of the technical issues, Thursday’s announcement leaves Scott Morrison with several fires to put out.

China’s reaction to the agreement so far uses routine language to accuse the AUKUS allies of a “cold war mentality.” As the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor has observed, Beijing must be aware its own defence build-up has helped create this level of alarm.

Trade issues might anyway be more pressing for the Chinese. The night before the AUKUS announcement, the Chinese commerce ministry fired another salvo in the US–China strategic contest by lodging a formal application to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a free-trade deal that links eleven countries including Australia. Although the timing appears entirely coincidental, the request painted the United States and its allies as preoccupied with military matters.

Pushed by George W. Bush’s administration, the original TPP was pursued by Barack Obama and negotiated to signature in 2016 by the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam. Then, after the Republicans stalled ratification in the US Senate, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2017. Malcolm Turnbull and Japan’s Shinzo Abe got the remaining parties to hang in, hoping for a change of mind in Washington. Biden says the agreement will need to be modified for this to happen.

The Chinese application sits oddly with Xi Jinping’s move back to promoting state-owned enterprises, subsidising selected industries, and separating off China’s internet and cloud storage — each of which would breach the terms of the TPP. But it will throw attention back on Washington’s position when Morrison and Japan’s Yoshihide Suga meet Biden on 24 September.

A more immediate challenge is the rift with France. Morrison has said he started thinking about the switch to nuclear submarines eighteen months ago. It wasn’t until June this year that he broached the idea with Biden — who has final say over transfers of the US nuclear-propulsion technology previously shared only with Britain — at his meeting with the US president and Johnson on the fringes of the G7 meeting. Morrison went on to Paris for an effusive meeting with Emmanuel Macron at which he made no mention of the impending decision. Eventually — about ten hours before the announcement, and after the first leaks by Morrison’s office started appearing in the media — defence minister Peter Dutton notified his French counterpart.

The rift throws into doubt the strategic spin-off from the cancelled submarine contract. France controls vast swathes of the Pacific through its territories’ economic exclusion zones, and French forces add to the West’s array of power in the Indo-Pacific. The political future of New Caledonia and French Polynesia are consequently being closely watched.

The French ambassador to Canberra, Jean-Pierre Thebault — recalled to Paris this week, along with his counterpart in Washington, over what the French foreign minister called “a stab in the back” — has revealed that France had offered Australia the nuclear version of its submarine. The agreed Shortfin Barracuda was actually a diesel-electric version of the Barracuda nuclear attack submarine, the first of which is now operating.

Thebault told the Sydney Morning Herald that his government had asked “at the very high level” whether Australia would be interested in nuclear-powered submarines and had “received no answer.” France had “a high level of expertise in nuclear reactors,” he pointed out. Seventy per cent of the country’s electricity is generated by nuclear plants.

Though closer, at 5000 tonnes, to the size originally sought by the Australian navy, the nuclear Barracuda had three disadvantages. It would not directly contribute to closer strategic engagement with the United States, symbolised by being entrusted with America’s nuclear-propulsion knowledge, nor would it help Boris Johnson’s vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain” beloved of Anglophiles in Coalition circles like Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer. And, unlike the American and British submarines, whose highly enriched fuel is believed to last the lifetime of the submarines, the French systems are believed to use less-enriched fuel that needs to be replaced every ten years. And the French submarines would not be attached to a nuclear umbrella.

That brings us to the domestic promises Scott Morrison has made about the new submarines: that they will be built in Adelaide, that no civil nuclear power industry needs to be developed to support them, and that the submarines don’t breach the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed by Australia, which bars the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Already the first promise is being watered down. The local content requirement for the submarines now seems to be 40 per cent — no doubt to the fury of Naval Group, which was being held to 60 per cent for the Shortfin Barracuda. Canberra briefings are also testing the idea of building the first one or two lead submarines in the United States or Britain to speed up the program. Meanwhile, about one hundred Australian workers who moved their families to France, and numerous Naval Group staff and contractors living in Adelaide, face a long gap before a new submarine program starts.

Steve Ludlam, the former ASC chief, has no doubt the Osborne yard could handle construction of either of the two most likely models of the Shortfin Barracuda, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest “Block V” version is 10,200 tonnes and 140 metres long, or Britain’s Astute-class, which is about 7000 tonnes and ninety-seven metres long.

An American naval expert told me that the hull section, which contains the highly secret reactor plant, could be shipped to Adelaide for assembly with the other hull sections. This is already done between the two shipyards building the Virginia-class for the US navy. “Every Virginia-class boat has been built this way, so this approach is well established,” the expert said.

Most Canberra reports suggest the Virginia-class will be the choice of the panel Morrison has set up to advise within eighteen months. But the American naval expert thinks the Astute-class will be favoured. The British boat is about the same length as the Barracuda and, importantly for the Australian navy, has fewer crew requirements — ninety-eight officers and sailors against 135 — than the Virginia-class.

Those who know about these things are cagey about the fuel endurance of the two submarines. Choosing the Barracuda would have required Australia either to build its own uranium enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication plants or to rely on French sources. But the expert said that a US or British design wouldn’t necessarily have fuel rods installed for the submarine’s lifetime.

Ludlam says the naval nuclear capability could be developed without a civilian industry, but that Australia already had expertise in the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which runs Lucas Heights and manages nuclear waste. “We are capable of doing it,” he says. “We haven’t got the same experience as the UK or US, but that’s the value of the partnership.”

The American expert agrees, while observing that it might make the naval program more expensive and pointing out that the US navy’s nuclear-propulsion program is run separately from the nuclear power industry.

But there are those who think a civil nuclear industry will follow, despite Morrison’s promise. “On the issue of nuclear power plants, don’t believe him,” Giles Parkinson, editor of Renew Economy, wrote on Friday. He points out that a poll by the Australian found that forty-eight of the Coalition’s 112 federal MPs and senators support nuclear energy.

“The nuclear lobby will say it is bizarre that Australia could be the only country in the world planning to sustain a nuclear-powered submarine fleet without a civil nuclear industry,” says Parkinson, noting that the Minerals Council of Australia has declared this to be “an incredible opportunity for Australia’s economy — not only will we develop the skills and infrastructure to support this naval technology, but it connects us to the growing global nuclear power industry and its supply chains.”

All these messy details can be pushed into the eighteen-month study behind closed doors, however, along with the costing. Construction in the United States or Britain would probably get eight boats for about US$40 billion (A$55 billion unless China undermines the Australian dollar by buying iron ore elsewhere), though the figure will be much higher if they’re built here.

And on Morrison’s third promise, Washington officials are saying the nuclear-propulsion transfer comes with an insistence the submarines will never carry nuclear weapons. Putting nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard a submarine, even a conventional one as Israel does, would be the most attainable delivery system for Australia. That now seems ruled out.

The doubts among Australia’s hard realists will no doubt remain: would the Americans really risk a Chinese nuclear strike for us?

Morrison, meanwhile, will be counting on his political fortunes being boosted by what his officials are describing in journalists’ briefings as a pivotal strategic decision to protect Australia. He might be hoping to get the same electoral bounce that some believe Robert Menzies received in 1963, recovering from his near defeat in 1961, after he announced the acquisition of the F-111 bomber. By the time the F-111s went into service in 1973 the threat from Indonesian president Sukarno’s fevered anti-Western posture had disappeared, and the aircraft never saw action.

The new submarines won’t start operating until about 2040 — well after the 2035 date Xi Jinping seems to have set for his own retirement, aged eighty-two, after he has settled the status of Taiwan and other outstanding issues. •

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Let’s leave aside the doubts about US staying power after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or Narendra Modi’s latest subversion of democratic freedoms revealed by the discovery of Israeli spyware in the phones of 300 critics. Or even Scott Morrison’s spell in Washington’s doghouse because of foot-dragging on climate change.

Principally, the timing is bad because the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, will be in his last days in office when the meeting takes place in Washington on 24 September. He will step down less than a week later to hand over to a successor to be chosen by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on 29 September.

When Shinzo Abe stepped down as prime minister in August 2020, citing a recurrence of stomach ulcers, Suga, now seventy-two, looked like a safe choice as successor. As Abe’s chief cabinet secretary he appeared to have been the brains and safe hands of the government, steadily implementing Abe’s retro-nationalist agenda while protecting him from successive scandals over political favours.

That reputation, which drew a 70 per cent approval rating in opinion polls when he stepped up, has now dissipated, largely thanks to Suga’s handing of the Covid pandemic.

In a not-unfamiliar picture for Australians, his government was slow to grasp the urgency of the vaccine rollout. Its health ministry insisted that Pfizer retest its vaccine in Japan, losing several weeks, even though the US trials had included people of Japanese origin. (The ministry said this didn’t count, as they wouldn’t have been eating Japanese food.) The Japan Medical Association, a powerful political donor, convinced Suga that local doctors were the best placed to give jabs. Many older people couldn’t make appointments because the smartphone app was too complicated.

Then Suga took a gamble on holding the summer Olympics despite the Delta variant’s resurgence and, with Japan’s vaccination level then just 23 per cent, amid fears the athletes could set off new outbreaks. Watching on TV, the Japanese were told hospitals were reserved for Olympians while they would have to endure Covid at home, except in the most severe cases.

A belated vaccination effort, in which the doctors’ lobby was pushed aside and the Jieitai (military) brought in to set up mass vaccination centres, has pushed the double-dose level among adults above 50 per cent, but the political damage was done.

In August, backed by three centrist and left-wing opposition parties, a university professor with expertise in pandemic analysis beat the Liberal Democrat candidate in elections for mayor of Yokohama. The port city near Tokyo is capital of Kanazawa prefecture, Suga’s political home ground.

With his approval rating below 30 per cent, and with younger and less-established Liberal Democrat members of the Diet worried about the House of Representatives election due by 28 November, no one was taking up Suga’s idea of a snap election or a cabinet reshuffle. Suga announced he wouldn’t be running in the party leadership ballot due at the end of this month.

The contest — a mix of public campaigning and the kind of backroom brokerage among the party’s seven factions that Yukio Mishima portrayed in his novel After the Banquet — has a half-dozen declared and potential candidates.

Among them, and the most popular with the public, if not his colleagues, is former defence and foreign minister Taro Kono, who at fifty-eight rates as a youngster among Liberal Democrats. Most recently, as Suga’s minister for administrative reform, he famously suggested Japan’s civil service might move on from letters and fax machines to fully digital communications. Although he was also in charge of the vaccine rollout, he seems to have gained credit for the recent progress rather than the earlier delays, which have been sheeted home to Suga.

With 2.5 million in his Japanese-language Twitter circle, Kono is more skilled than most of his colleagues in reaching the public. He has vowed to press on with reforms, and has moderated his anti-nuclear position by conceding that power stations shut down after the Fukushima disaster might be used again while Japan phases out coal, oil and natural gas to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Asked about his volatile temperament, he said he would be a leader who “laughs and cries together” with the Japanese people.

He would also be a very presentable face for Japan in the Quad and in the wider world. He opted to study at Washington’s Georgetown University rather than one of the elite Japanese universities that prepare the young for top political, bureaucratic and business circles. He is versed in the big diplomatic and strategic issues from his previous portfolios, and as far as the Quad goes, supports closer military ties with the United States and its allies, even angling for Japanese membership of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing pact.

As importantly, he brings greater nuance and empathy to Japan’s troubled history with its East Asian neighbours. A third-generation Liberal Democrat, he is the son of Yohei Kono, who in 1993, as chief cabinet secretary, issued a statement officially recognising that so-called comfort women were put into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army in wartime.

The “Kono statement” was a step towards dealing with this historical abuse, but the contrition was wound back when Liberal Democrat politicians on Shinzo Abe’s side of the party claimed that army brothels were simply commercial businesses and their workers all volunteers. The controversy has given a bitter edge to relations between Japan and South Korea, the two most powerful US allies in the region.

As Daisuke Akimoto of Temple University, Japan writes in the Diplomat, “It is possible to theorise that Kono has long waited to become prime minister in order to follow his father’s diplomatic footsteps, with a view to promoting Japan’s reconciliation diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region.” But Kono, perhaps with an eye on his party colleagues, hasn’t played up this aspect of his legacy yet.

What he has said is that, as prime minister, he wouldn’t be visiting the Yasukuni shrine, the Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead. Because it pays homage to Pacific war leaders executed by the Allies for war crimes, as well as ordinary soldiery, and because its museum portrays Japan’s pre-1945 campaigns as well-intentioned, political visits to Yasukuni are seen elsewhere in Asia as excusing aggression.

All of which makes Kono somewhat suspect in the eyes of the party’s retro-nationalists, with terms like “maverick” expressing this sentiment.

Kono’s closest rivals look like being former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, sixty-two, a figure who has long hovered near the top of the party and who declared his candidacy early, and Shigeru Ishiba, sixty-four, a former defence minister who is yet to decide whether to run. Either would be a business-as-usual prime minister but hardly likely to jolt Japan out of its longstanding economic and social ennui.

The wildcard candidate is Sanae Takaichi, sixty, who would be Japan’s first female prime minister but hardly a standard-bearer for feminism. She has opposed steps to break down the nation’s patriarchies, including allowing married women to keep their own family name and introducing female succession to the imperial throne. “She belongs to a kind of Japanese woman who gets ahead by being more macho than her male colleagues,” says Andrew Horvat, a Canadian academic long resident in Tokyo.

Early in her career, Takaichi worked as an intern for a Democratic congressman in Washington and played drums in a rock band. Since then she’s marched to a different drum. Nurtured in her home city of Nara by a notorious war-guilt denialist, one-time justice minister Seisuke Okuno, Takaichi belongs to Nippon Kaigi and Jinja Honjo, organisations intent on returning Japan’s politics and society to their pre-1945 state and restoring the emperor’s semi-divine status. As a minister she has visited the Yasukuni shrine many times.

An ally of Shinzo Abe and his brother, defence minister Nobuo Kishi, Takaichi is among those in the Liberal Democrat camp who promote closer relations with Taiwan. Taken over by Japan in 1895 as part of the settlement of a war with imperial China, the island has long been seen in Japan as the success story of Japanese colonialism, in contrast to the later annexation of Korea. Supporting Taiwan is part of standing up to China, with US bases in Japan key to its defence. For the first time, Tokyo’s latest defence white paper declared “peace and security in the Taiwan Strait” as a priority, a warning to Beijing that also crept into the communiqué from this year’s Australia–Japan meeting of foreign affairs and defence ministers.

As she began her run for the leadership, Takaichi called for amendment of Japan’s post-1945 constitution to transform the Jieitai from its circumscribed role in defence of Japan to a “national defence force” able to strike out, including by launching pre-emptive attacks on missile bases in places like North Korea.

The puzzle about her candidacy is that it has been openly backed by Shinzo Abe himself. With only 4 per cent approval in the polls, Takaichi is a very long shot. If Abe is seeking cover against prosecution for his latest scandal — some ¥23 million (A$285,000) spent from covert funds during 2015–20 to bring constituents to the prime minister’s annual cherry-blossom viewing party — this surely could be obtained from a more popular candidate. Or possibly Takaichi is a stalking horse for an attempted return by Abe himself, who at sixty-six is aged midway between Suga and the present line-up.

A later date for the Quad meeting might have been advisable. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Even before the airlift of foreign citizens and at-risk Afghans has ended, the question presents itself: do we have any continuing interests in Afghanistan? That has just been answered: preventing terrorism, if nothing else. So, does the West work with a Taliban-run Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan or against it?

Much will depend on the nature of that government. Taliban leaders have promised that an amnesty will be applied to former government soldiers and civil servants, that women can work and girls study wearing only headscarves or cowls rather than the full-body covering, and even that the right kind of music will be allowed. Many with long knowledge of the Taliban will believe all this when they see it.

Future relations will also depend on who beyond the Taliban leadership the new government includes in more than a token way. Hamid Karzai, the president installed after the United States helped eject the last Taliban regime in 2001, is back in Kabul talking to them. Abdullah Abdullah, a veteran of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of the 1990s and a senior figure in the ousted Ashraf Ghani government, is another.

Afghan resistance is also a factor. Ahmad Shah Massoud, son of the legendary anti-Soviet mujahideen warlord of the same name killed by al Qaeda in 2001, is holding out in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. He may have been joined by Amrullah Saleh, vice-president in Ghani’s government, who stepped down and fled the country just ahead of Kabul’s fall — which Saleh says makes him the “legitimate caretaker president.” Unless Massoud can lever his way into power sharing and policy moderation, a new phase of civil war might be starting.

The Taliban must also grapple with an Afghanistan that is vastly more sophisticated than the one they ran in their previous five years of rule to 2001. In those days, non-violent resistance was by word-of-mouth and anonymous letters. In Herat, Mohammed Nasir Kafesh circulated his unsigned satirical poetry on scraps of paper, unsigned, and Leila Razeqi, after being expelled from university for being a woman, organised tutorials for herself and friends under the guise of a sewing circle.

As Financial Times correspondent Jon Boone has noted, Afghanistan had very few telephone lines twenty years ago. Now 90 per cent of the country’s forty million people have access to mobile phones, with twelve million using data services. Even illiterate people have smartphones and Facebook accounts set up by village phone shops. Journalism is thriving. Cities are full of young Afghans returned from study and work experience overseas. Taliban leaders themselves are adept users of social media.

All of this could be turned off, of course. During the advance on Kabul, Taliban units shut down local mobile networks at night to prevent tip-offs about their movements. But once safely in power, would the leadership rob themselves of this channel to the population, as well as all its potential developmental leaps in e-commerce and banking?

The Kabul airport bombings also provide an early test of assurances that Afghanistan will no longer be a base for external terrorists, as it was for al Qaeda under the previous emirate. At a meeting with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Tianjin on 28 July, Taliban co-founder and political wing chief Abdul Ghani Baradar gave an assurance that the Taliban “will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for plotting against another country.” Wang asked the Taliban to “deal resolutely” with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an underground movement among the Uighurs of Xinjiang, adjacent to Afghanistan across the Pamir mountains. Baradar also welcomed continuing Chinese investment in Afghanistan.

Similar assurances — in their case, about Chechen jihadists and cooperative engagement — are thought to have been given to the Russians.

The Taliban also promised during the two years of negotiations in Qatar with Donald Trump’s special envoy not to let Afghanistan again be the base for terrorist groups. Trump didn’t achieve his second aim — getting the Taliban to enter power-sharing talks with Ghani’s government — despite releasing 5000 hardcore Taliban prisoners, who promptly went back into the fray. He went ahead anyway with his drawdown of US forces, to be completely out by 1 May this year, on the basis of the Taliban’s agreeing not to attack them. (Joe Biden extended the deadline to 11 September, the twentieth anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks that led to the US invasion, but later shortened it to 31 August.)

Separately, the Sunni-based Taliban assured Iran that it would no longer discriminate against or persecute its fellow Shia Muslims in Afghanistan, including the Hazaras, who streamed out as refugees, many to Australia, during the last Taliban ascendency.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, security analysts are cheering what they see as the severing of India’s post-2001 engagement with Kabul, which has seen about US$3 billion in investments and an array of civil society and state-building projects, including 2000 scholarships a year for undergraduate study in India.

Behind this upbeat appraisal is some nervousness about possible blowback into Pakistan itself. The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency fostered the formation of the Taliban from the country’s Koranic schools and launched them across the border. Now analysts worry that Pakistan’s own Taliban will feel encouraged to step up attacks on the state. Prime minister Imran Khan sent his foreign minister around Iran and the Central Asian republics this week to enlist them in his push to urge the Taliban to reach out beyond its ethnic Pushtun base.

The same goes for Beijing. Beneath the derision at the failure of twenty years of US state-building is thought to be great unease at a radical Islamist regime being installed in the centre of the Eurasian network of its Belt and Road Initiative.

In Kabul itself, China, Russia and Pakistan have kept their embassies open. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which along with Pakistan were the only countries to recognise the last Taliban emirate, are likely to be back, along with Qatar, the recent intermediary between the Taliban and the United States. India has withdrawn, evacuating citizens as well as Sikh and Hindu locals, and is taking a wait-and-see position on reopening its embassy in consultation with Russia.

The Americans, of course, made a priority of helicoptering their embassy staff out to Kabul airport. But the two years of Qatar negotiations, circumventing the US-backed government in Kabul, have given Washington a greater familiarity with some of the Taliban leadership. On 23 August, Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns flew into Kabul to meet the Taliban’s             , presumably to talk about problems in the evacuation operation, but perhaps also to discuss longer-term issues. It can’t have been warm — the outfit that rained down Predator drone strikes talking to the one that set off roadside bombs — but it showed some pragmatism.

Two days later, US secretary of state Anthony Blinken said the Biden administration is not abandoning Afghanistan but rather shifting its focus from military power to diplomacy, cybersecurity and financial pressure. He said that the administration has worked hard to build alliances and that the United States would continue to work with allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The financial pressure involves the conditions Washington has placed on the release of the US$9 billion foreign reserves of the Afghan state, which are held in US institutions, and the US$450 million in special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund, in which Washington and the Europeans pull the strings. It doesn’t sound very friendly so far; more like war by other means.

And Australia’s role? When Biden announced in April his target of fully withdrawing forces, Scott Morrison’s government didn’t wait around. On 28 May, Canberra closed its embassy in Kabul, and withdrew the ambassador, Paul Wojciechowski, and his staff to the United Arab Emirates, from where they were to operate on a fly-in, fly-out basis, as required.

With its implied lack of confidence in Kabul, the rapid exit is said to have met with strong disapproval in Washington and London. In retrospect, it also pre-empted two and a half months of embassy operation on the ground that could have expedited visas and passages out for Afghans at risk because of their work with the Australian military and civil projects.

Veteran diplomats hear that a contributing factor was a fear among foreign affairs department figures that they would be blamed for “occupational health and safety” failings if anything went wrong. But some also believe that statements by defence minister Peter Dutton — that some former Australian army interpreters might have switched to the Taliban or Islamic State, or even steered Australian troops onto improvised explosive devices — suggest a cynical “playing to the base” in abandoning Afghanistan.

Just before yesterday’s bombing, Dutton reacted to intelligence warning of an imminent attack by withdrawing Australia’s small detachment of soldiers and officials from the airport, leaving the Americans and British to hold the line. He said it was “wheels up” on the evacuation that had brought out 4000 citizens and visa-holders, leaving behind an uncertain number. The defence minister indicated the operation is unlikely to resume in the days remaining to the Taliban and American deadline of 31 August for an end to the military evacuation of civilians.

Nor is Canberra likely to reopen an embassy any time soon. Morrison would be wary of offending the 26,000 veterans who served in the 2001–14 military campaign against the Taliban, with forty-one of their comrades killed and hundreds of them suffering physical injury and mental trauma. Voices among the 70,000 Afghan-Australian population also object strongly to any recognition of the Taliban they or their parents fled, even though an Australian mission would help them to bring out relatives.

Aid organisations are keen to resume operations, with one official telling me a working relationship with Kabul is necessary. A US congressional report on 30 April described how Covid-19 and rising urban poverty levels mean that 16.9 million people are facing a “crisis” of food insecurity, including 5.5 million people experiencing “emergency” levels — the second-highest in the world after the Democratic Republic of Congo — and almost half of children under five years old are projected to face acute malnutrition in 2021.

No doubt this will weigh little with the Morrison government, nor indeed the Labor opposition. Next week present and former leaders, John Howard and Julia Gillard among them, will join celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, glossing over the hasty exits from Kabul. It’s wheels up on that alliance exercise. Or is it? •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Our enemy’s enemy appeared first on Inside Story.

The 5 August ruling by Federal Court judge Richard White, sitting as a presidential member of the AAT, stripped away the prime minister’s veil of secrecy around proceedings of the national cabinet, in which Morrison meets state and territory leaders to discuss pandemic strategy.

The judge upheld Patrick’s appeal against the refusal of the prime minister’s department to disclose the national cabinet’s minutes, and tore into its argument that the group met as a subcommittee of federal cabinet and was therefore subject to the twenty-year secrecy rule.

The government was given twenty-eight days to appeal before the judge’s decision takes effect. But any appeal must be based on points of law, and the options seem narrow. Patrick says he is ready to fight for the documents in the Federal Court and the High Court if necessary. “If they want to push on with it, there’s no harm from my side,” he tells me.

In fact, the crossbench senator is basking in the attention his secrecy-busting has attracted, and that’s invaluable for a first-term independent facing election within ten months. “People who are really engaged in politics and perhaps law and transparency issues are very interested in the fact of the judgement, the nature of the decision,” says Patrick. “Everyone else just says good on Rex for beating up Scott.”

The appeal is the latest in a dozen wins on freedom of information cases Patrick has taken to the AAT, the federal information commissioner and appeals bodies back in his home state of South Australia.

Transparency has been his campaign theme since taking his old boss Nick Xenophon’s place in the Senate in November 2017, following Xenophon’s resignation to contest the South Australian election, unsuccessfully as it turned out. On his first day as senator, Patrick sought details of water buy-backs in the Murray–Darling basin, eliciting the independent valuations that eventually showed that the federal government had paid vastly excessive prices to private interests for the water.

Some 200 FOI requests and pointed questioning of public servants in Senate estimates have made Patrick something of a terror for the government and bureaucracy. Xenophon dubbed him “Inspector Rex,” after the tenacious German shepherd in the beloved Austrian and Italian police series.

On one occasion, Patrick was in the AAT arguing against seven lawyers for the Commonwealth and a company. He has spent approaching $15,000 of his own funds in pursuing FOI applications, and in many cases he has also been able to make gratis public interest claims as a senator. He gets good advice: in the national cabinet case, the Canberra historian and journalist Philip Dorling found a 1940s precedent that undercut the argument of Morrison’s department head, Phil Gaetjens.

A particular focus has been the huge investment in naval shipbuilding in his home state, which started under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Patrick has exposed the escalating prices, technical risks and slipping delivery times of the now $90 billion future submarine and $45 billion future frigate builds. Coming from a background in the navy and the defence industry, he carries authority. “When I read him, I think: this bloke does know what he’s talking about,” says Haydon Manning, an adjunct professor of politics at Adelaide’s Flinders University.

Patrick’s new target is the Howard government’s policymaking on the Timor Sea maritime boundary with Timor-Leste, just as the new nation was emerging from a United Nations interregnum following the end of Indonesia’s occupation in 1999.

Those maritime discussions were a prelude to the bugging of Timor-Leste government offices in Dili by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 2004 during fraught boundary negotiations. Distinguished Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery and a former ASIS officer named only as Witness K are on trial over alleged disclosure of the operation.

Patrick told the Senate last week that the operation was probably illegal and therefore improperly authorised by then foreign minister Alexander Downer for the benefit of Australia’s Woodside Petroleum, which led a consortium with rights to the big Greater Sunrise natural gas deposit straddling the contested sea border. Noting that former attorney-general George Brandis stalled the prosecutions of Collaery and Witness K for three years, Patrick questions his successor Christian Porter’s judgement in letting them proceed.

Again, the fact that he speaks as someone who was once immersed in the armed forces, and almost certainly in intelligence-gathering, strengthens his point that this was an egregious misuse of ASIS.

Having migrated with his parents from New Zealand, Rex Patrick grew up in the coastal South Australian town of Whyalla, where he joined the navy aged sixteen. Once his talents were spotted, he was trained as an electronics engineer, running radar, sonar and communications systems. His sea service during the 1980s was mostly on the Oberon-class submarines, legendary for snooping on naval bases in places like Vladivostok and Shanghai. Patrick is guarded about the details. “Everyone in submarines is cleared to top secret, and will find themselves at some stage conducting highly classified surveillance and intelligence operations,” he says.

After eleven years he left for a specialist sonar company, working with navies around the world, and then set up his own sonar advisory company. A decade ago, his writings for defence industry journals about the looming replacement of the Australian navy’s present Collins-class submarines led to him advising former Coalition defence spokesperson David Johnston.

But he declined an offer to join Johnston’s staff when the Liberal MP became defence minister in 2013. Unhappy that the major parties approached all issues from a partisan viewpoint, he was attracted by Xenophon’s different “algorithm” when someone asked him to take up an issue: “If it was right and he could do something about it, he would take it on.”

Patrick shut down his company and started working in Xenophon’s Senate office. But he didn’t anticipate filling Xenophon’s seat. “I’m an accidental senator — I never ever sought a pathway to entering politics,” he says. “I got here by seeing the government embarking on the very costly, very risky future submarine project.”

He clearly thinks Canberra would have been better sticking to an existing submarine like the German Type 214. “They are superb submarines, and they will do 90 per cent of what the Australian navy requires,” he said. “Unfortunately, when you try for the other 10 per cent, that’s when you triple the price and quadruple the risk.”

Now the navy waits on innovative French-designed vessels, adapted from a nuclear-powered model, that will arrive ten years later than originally envisaged. In the meantime, the lives of the Collins-class submarines will be extended at a cost of $10 billion.

Patrick’s career also informs his approach to issues like the ASIS operation in Dili. “I came from a submarine background, where submarines conduct intelligence operations, and that happens all the time between countries,” he says. “Nations keep an eye on their neighbours and their capabilities and I have no objection to that. I also have no objection to intelligence services looking out for us.”

But this was different, he says. “This was a negotiation that in law was supposed to be in good faith. That’s what we signed up to, with one of the poorest nations on earth. Ultimately that operation harmed our relationship with East Timor. I’ve been up there. I’ve seen the Chinese building freeways on the southern plateau, power lines, ports. I can’t help but think that the Chinese have gained a strategic foothold based on Australia treating them in an awful way.”

From his maiden speech onwards, Patrick has pressed for parliament’s intelligence and security committee to have the same powers of investigation over intelligence services as the equivalent committees in the United States Congress. Australia’s Intelligence Services Act of 2001 created the committee but barred it from looking into any past, present or proposed operations.

Following up on Patrick’s statement last week on the Collaery–Witness K prosecutions, Labor senator Katy Gallagher says a Labor government would authorise an inquiry into the Dili operation, first amending the Intelligence Services Act to allow it. Patrick will believe it when he sees it, as Labor has voted against his similar amendments on six occasions.

Clinton Fernandes, a UNSW professor of international relations who has also battled intelligence secrecy with FOI appeals, gives Patrick full marks for persistence. “There are others like [MP] Andrew Wilkie and [senator] Nick McKim and so on, but in terms of consistency and banging the drum as often as he can, it’s Rex Patrick,” Fernandes says, adding that “his opposition is not to the intelligence system as a whole, or even part, but that specific problem that’s not able to be examined.”

Patrick says the amendment would be a crucial safeguard. “The intelligence services have greatly increased powers since the establishment of that committee, powers exercised in secret, and generally involving impositions on people’s liberties and rights to privacy. And my view is you have to have the correct checks and balances in place.”

His attitude brought him into public dispute with a key figure behind those greater security powers. After the Australian Federal Police raids on the ABC’s Sydney headquarters and the Canberra journalist Annika Smethurst in 2019, Patrick said then home affairs minister Peter Dutton and department secretary Mike Pezzullo “clearly hate media scrutiny” and had a double standard about leaks. Pezzullo rang Patrick and asked him to “reconsider” his remarks. Patrick took this as threatening and pushed back. Pezzullo was given a pro forma rebuke by Dutton.

Federal governments have had Senate majorities for only thirty months over the past forty years, and Australia probably accepts the virtues of the upper house’s plural voices, especially as that last spell of government control, in 2005–07, led to John Howard’s overreaching with his WorkChoices legislation.

As well as scrutinising and proposing amendments to legislation, the Senate and its committees have an important oversight role, says Patrick. “The most important thing about Senate estimates is not what gets revealed there, but that the people who are working in government buildings who are making decisions and spending taxpayers’ money must always be thinking: what or how will I answer questions about what I’m doing at the next estimates?”

For the crossbenchers who put the swing factor into this oversight, a Senate career is often just six years or less. The Greens have their niche vote, and some earlier splinters from the main parties, like the Democratic Labor Party and the Australian Democrats, had a longer span. For others, like Jacqui Lambie and Pauline Hanson, longevity can depend on personal projection. That’s why Patrick cut himself loose from the Centre Alliance with the aim of boosting his own name recognition.

South Australian voters tend to kindness towards politicians in the middle. Flinders University’s Manning says they liked the late Janine Haines’s “plague on both your houses” approach when she led the Australian Democrats. They backed Steele Hall when he split from the old Liberal Country League to form his Liberal Movement, and later returned to the Liberal Party. Local Labor leaders like Don Dunstan and John Bannon were hardly blue-collar. So Xenophon’s group fitted well into that moderate, centrist tendency.

Even so, Manning thinks Patrick may struggle for re-election. To win a slot, he will need 14 per cent or slightly more of the vote. “He might get 5 per cent but where’s he going to get the preference help?” says Manning.

“The sad reality is you can be as smart as anything as a senator, you can be really good on policy, but in the end do most voters get what you’re going on about?” says Manning. “I’m not so sure.” Xenophon carefully based his media “stunts” on policy issues he knew would resonate broadly, like poker machines, he says. “Do most voters really ponder about the national cabinet and its machinations? Though it’s really important and interesting, I did wonder about Rex on that one.”

Patrick says he is getting a steady flow of small campaign donations. He has also been careful, he says, to balance his efforts with bread-and-butter issues like JobKeeper and tax compliance. His strong stand against China’s treatment of its Uighur minority has attracted support, even though the state’s wine industry has suffered for Canberra’s frosty relations with Beijing.

“I would like to be re-elected,” says Patrick. “I like what I do, and I think I do reasonably well as a single person, with a very good team working behind me. But if I got to the election and was unsuccessful, I would just move on to the next stage of my life without batting an eyelid.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The accidental senator appeared first on Inside Story.

Many people have been reminded of that novel — or the film version starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner — in the depths of the pandemic lockdowns. Despite the quip that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world,” falsely attributed to Gardner, the British-born Shute showed great affection for the city, and indeed for Australia as whole.

This bestselling British author had upped sticks and moved to Australia in 1950, and would spend the last decade of his life on a property southeast of Melbourne. Starting that year with A Town Like Alice, his immensely popular books portrayed Australia as a sunny land of opportunity — and plentiful steak and eggs — contrasted with a tightly rationed Britain in the grip of complacent civil servants and envy-ridden politicians. They helped fuel the surge of “ten-pound Poms” taking up the Australian government’s offer of assisted migration. When Shute died in 1960, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran an editorial declaring that “this country has lost one of its greatest friends and propagandists.”

And so, when a reporting trip recently took me to Queensland, I decided to look at the unlikely place where this infatuation began: the country on the southern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. From November 1948 until January the following year, Shute and his friend James Riddell toured this region in a light aircraft they’d flown out from Britain. In those days, cut off during the three-month “wet” and baked dry for the rest of the year, the region’s human population counted in the hundreds.

At Normanton, not far inland, Shute and Riddell met pastoralist Jim Edwards, who had been a prisoner of war working on the Burma railway. For filching food from the Japanese, he’d been tied with wire to a tree for three days and bashed with rifle butts. He became the model for A Town Like Alice’s Joe Harman, the archetypal Australian bushman, laconic and true, played by Peter Finch in the 1956 film of the book and by Bryan Brown in the 1981 miniseries.

Immensely popular: Nevil Shute in London in 1953. Picture Post/Getty Images

Shute had also come across the story of a group of Dutch women and children who had been shunted around Sumatra for three years by the Japanese. He made them the novel’s English families, marched around Malaya by perplexed guards, with a Malay-speaking planter’s daughter, Jean Paget, assuming leadership. Barefoot, sarong-clad and, like all of Shute’s heroines, wise beyond her years, she was played by Virginia McKenna in the film and Helen Morse in the miniseries.

Shute joined his storylines in occupied Malaya, when Joe Harman, driving a truck for the Japanese, steals his commandant’s chickens to feed Paget’s group. He is caught, nailed through the hands to a post and left to die. Although he is rescued, he only learns much later that Paget and her group survived — and, moreover, that she was Miss Paget, not Mrs as he’d assumed.

Back running a cattle lease in the Gulf, Joe scores a modest lottery win and sets off to London to track her down. Meanwhile, Jean, now a secretary in a London leather-goods firm, has come into an inheritance (another favourite Shute plot device) and goes back to Malaya to repay the villagers who sheltered her group. Having learned that Joe had survived, she travels on to Australia to find him, first to Alice Springs and then to “Willstown,” where he now works.

After many crossed wires the pair meet in Cairns. Joe is somewhat awed by the smart English lady Jean has become, but the ice is finally broken on Green Island in the Great Barrier Reef when Jean dresses in her old sarong. Though the gates of passion open, they agree to wait until they are married.

Shute’s love affairs were always chaste until marriage. He boycotted the premiere of On the Beach because its director, Stanley Kramer, had the US nuclear submarine commander, played by Peck, consummate his relationship with his Australian friend, played by Gardner, instead of staying loyal to his wife, presumed dead in America.

Leaving Cairns and Green Island, Joe and Jean return to “Willstown,” where Jean sets out to revive the old mining town and make it “a town like Alice.” Her scheme is to set up a shoe-making factory using the handy local supply of crocodile skins and employing girls who would otherwise head for the big cities. With a supply of young white women enticed further by a new ice-cream parlour, open-air cinema and hair salon, young white men also throng to Willstown. Soon new houses are going up on abandoned lots and the footpaths are full of prams.

To get to the original of that fictionalised place, I take the Trans North bus from Cairns to Normanton, then rent a four-wheel drive with a strong bull bar for a 230-kilometre journey along Australia’s national Highway 1, hereabouts called the Savannah Way. If you follow for the next 13,000 kilometres, as a lot of grey nomads do, it will take you around the edge of Australia and bring you back to the same place.

Highway 1 is sealed by the Queensland state government from Cairns to Normanton. But from there to the Northern Territory border, about 700 kilometres, it is left to the two local shires to maintain, a task clearly beyond the means of their few hundred ratepayers. Strips of bitumen alternate with gravel and dried mud, though most of the frequent wet-season floodways have concrete paving. The trees are stunted except along creek beds, ant hills are ranked like tombstones, a wedge-tailed eagle gorges on the carcass of one of the wallabies lying dead by the road.

Before reaching the river named after the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who traversed this country in the 1840s, I turn onto a dirt track and come to a lonely monument marking the northernmost camp of Burke and Wills in their hubristic attempt to make the first south–north crossing of Australia. Across the Leichhardt, I come to a strip of sealed road that leads into Burketown, the none-too-hidden model for Willstown.

Even after seventy years, it hasn’t become a town anything like Alice. The population is just 176, with 152 more in the surrounding 40,000 square kilometres of Burke Shire — not counting the temporary residents of its Century nickel mine, the dry-season tourists, or the 1200 or so people of the Aboriginal shire of Doomadgee, to the west.

Still, it’s a great improvement on the town Shute would have seen. For one thing it has trees, thanks to a permanent water supply from a spring-fed river up-country, and a central grassy park with sprinklers pumping away. The Commonwealth Hotel, where Shute would have stayed, burnt down in 1954; in its place is the Savannah Lodge, with cabins set among thick greenery around a Southeast Asian–style open-sided lounge.

When I phone him the next morning, Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp, is out on his horse somewhere on his cattle spread. He tells me that when he was a small boy in the 1960s conditions were still primitive. “If you wanted a power supply you had to generate your own, or use carbide or kerosene lamps.” No roads were sealed, he says, and there was a single telephone line. “You could wait up to three days to get a telephone call out.”

As in most towns across Australia with significant Indigenous populations, the local Aboriginal people lived in shanty settlements out of sight. “I can remember coming into Burketown as a kid and seeing a complex of buildings just outside town,” Camp says. “Most people referred to it as a compound.” The only Aboriginal people in Shute’s novel are out on the cattle stations, as stockmen or as domestic servants in the homesteads, speaking broken English, subservient, and bearing offensive joke names like Bournville and Palmolive.

“People here were pretty much enslaved out on stations,” community leader Murrandoo Yanner tells me later that day at the offices of the Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council. “They used to pay the mob in opium. Then they switched to paying us in tobacco, flour, sugar and tea, and one uniform a year. You got a pair of boots, a hat, and pastoral clothes.”

Murrandoo Yanner, who assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. Anna Rogers/Newspix

“We were all out on the fringes, on reserves on the edge of town,” recalls Yanner, whose first name means “whirlwind” or “waterspout” and replaces the “Jayson” he was first given.

His great-grandmother brought her children into Burketown after a massacre of Aborigines, including her husband, by police and pastoralists early last century. This was not the last clash: only five years before Shute’s visit, on Bentinck Island some forty kilometres from Burketown, spear-wielding Aborigines confronted a launch carrying Australian air force radar technicians from Mornington Island. They thought that the men, who had stopped for water on their way to Burketown, were about to abuse their women like a previous army survey team had done. One Aboriginal man was shot dead.

“It was worse than Soweto,” Yanner says of the fringe camp. “No water, no sewerage, you had to walk kilometres to get your water in buckets. Pit toilets, housing just tin shacks. People used to live off the land basically, aside from the rations they used to drop off. People controlling the rations would often rort that, keep half of it and sell it on the sly in the black market to their white mates.”

Shute didn’t show us this side of his Willstown, though he has entrepreneurial Jean Paget set up a separate space for Aboriginal customers in her ice-cream parlour, with an Aboriginal girl serving. Throughout A Town Like Alice, he used pejorative white Australian terms — “boongs” or “Abos” — while showing surprising understanding and respect for Malays and even putting some of the Japanese guards in a sympathetic light. The Aboriginal locals were just part of the background.

Shute was not outstandingly racist for his times. In an earlier novel, The Chequer Board (1947), he explored two examples of interracial marriage, a Black GI to an English girl, an English airman to a Burmese woman. In another of his Australian novels, Beyond the Black Stump (1956), he lampoons an American family for their appalled reaction when his Australian heroine mentions that her pastoralist father had fathered several children with an Aboriginal woman before her white mother arrived on the scene.

In a second novel derived from his time in the Gulf country, the weird and largely forgotten In the Wet (1953), he has a baby born to a Scottish stockman and his “half-caste” wife rising to become squadron leader David Anderson in the Royal Australian Air Force three decades later.

In the Wet’s picture of Britain in the imagined 1983 is grim, with rationing continuing under a miserable Labour government and pasty-faced people shuffling in bus queues. The white “dominions” are forging ahead, meanwhile, with the populations of Australia and Canada growing to near parity with Britain. Their dynamism is thanks to a modification of democracy, started in Australia, whereby one person, one vote is augmented by extra votes for having a university degree, overseas experience, raising two children to fourteen without getting a divorce, earning more than £5000 a year, being active in church, or being rewarded by royal decree.

As British prime minister Iorwerth Jones tightens the purse strings on the royal family, the Australian and Canadian governments, royalist to their bootstraps, each chip in a fully crewed jet airliner of the latest design (somehow this miserable Britain is still making advanced aircraft) for the Queen’s Flight regiment. When Anderson is tapped to fly the RAAF’s royal airliner, he asks if his race might be a problem. After all, he is a “quadroon” and commonly known as “Nigger” Anderson among his mates. Not at all, you just look a bit tanned, says Group Captain Cox, the Queen’s Flight commander. “We aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family.”

The dominions’ gesture only makes things worse for the royals. They secretly leave Britain aboard the two aircraft, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip travelling to Canberra in a jet piloted by Anderson and installing themselves at the vice-regal residence, while Prince Charles and Princess Anne disperse to Canada and Kenya. Her Majesty then appoints a tough army general, risen from the ranks, as governor-general of Britain.

Anderson meanwhile marries a Buckingham Palace secretary (another example of Shute’s stock heroine, a wise but intrepid young woman) who travels out with the Queen. She has checked out the possibility of a “throwback” baby, and been assured this could only happen if she too had non-European ancestry. On the flight out to Australia, it is Anderson who discovers a bomb in the cargo bay. “He was one quarter Aboriginal,” writes Shute, “not wholly of European stock, and in some directions his perceptions and his sensibilities were stronger than in ordinary men.” A 1970s movie version would have had a didgeridoo playing at this point.

In the Wet is the most bitter expression of Shute’s hatred of Clement Atlee’s Labour government and the welfare state bureaucracy he left behind. His autobiography, Slide Rule (1954), about his earlier career as an aircraft engineer, helps explain that hostility. During 1924–30 Shute had helped build a prototype airship, the British answer to Germany’s zeppelins, which made a successful flight to Canada. The rival public sector project, lavished with funding, crashed on its maiden voyage to India, with great loss of life.

Shute then founded his own aircraft company, Airspeed, and much of the book is about his struggle to raise capital. Government and banks were hopeless, he found, and the best source of funds was people with inherited wealth — the class found on the hunting field, the Cresta Run, the horse races and the yachting events. But they, he believed, were being taxed out of existence.

Tax was hitting Shute hard too. Having sold his shares in Airspeed for £3 million, and with his novels selling more than 100,000 copies in their first print runs and film deals starting to come in, he was a very wealthy man when he turned to full-time writing after spending the war thinking up fanciful weapons for the Royal Navy. By 1950, when he departed Britain, the top marginal tax rate was nineteen shillings and sixpence in the pound, or 97.5 per cent. Australia’s top rate was a less confiscatory 67 per cent.

He and his family settled on a small farm at Langwarrin, on the eastern side of Port Philip Bay, where he turned out more novels about Australia featuring lonely men and women finding each other in times of war or natural disaster, sprinkled with jibes at Atlee’s government and the miseries of postwar Britain.

Alice revisited: Bryan Brown and Helen Morse in Seven’s 1981 version.

While the British public lapped it up — A Town Like Alice sold 1.5 million copies — Shute’s infatuation with his new home country came to irk critics back in London. In Australia, though, there is little evidence that Shute’s portrayal was too cloying. It fed into self-laudatory stereotypes for decades, fuelling the huge popularity of the Seven Network’s 1981 miniseries of A Town Like Alice.

By then, of course, the country had changed in ways Shute couldn’t have envisaged. The exercise of Crown reserve powers in 1975, though not as drastic as the events in In the Wet, made us much more equivocal about the monarchy. The European migrants who figure in The Far Country (1952) had been augmented with Turks, Vietnamese and Lebanese. If he had existed, Squadron Leader (Retired) Anderson might have been joining a claim for his mother’s traditional lands. And Britain, far from being socialist, was getting tough conservative medicine from Margaret Thatcher.

Another forty years later, it’s not just the extra trees that make Burketown different. The 1967 referendum started profound social change, reinforced in economic terms by the 1992 Mabo judgement, for the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi peoples of the region. “It wasn’t always pleasant to upset the status quo,” Yanner tells me. “They were very violent in the upheaval that had to occur — the agitation of the soil to bring new growth.”

I query the use of that word, violent. “The miners, the pastoralists, were applying great levels of violence,” he says. “The police would come and arrest us if we were trying to defend ourselves. We drew a line in the sand and said, ‘What more can you do to us?’ We took it on the chin, went to jail but we stood up for ourselves. Till they realised we wouldn’t take any more pushing and they started to respect us. We were just defending ourselves and our rights, we weren’t attacking them.”

Aged only nineteen, Yanner assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. He was harassed by the Queensland police during agitation for compensation from the big Century open-cut mine southwest of Burketown, then owned by Conzinc Riotinto — events recounted in The Gulf Country, a book by University of Queensland anthropologist Richard Martin, commissioned by Burke Shire.

At one point, the police prosecuted Yanner under an obscure fauna protection law when they found two small crocodiles in his freezer. After a magistrate dismissed the charge, the government of National Party premier Rob Borbidge, who called the High Court judges in the Mabo case “historical dills,” appealed the decision. It went to the High Court, which upheld Yanner’s traditional right to catch crocodiles.

A spate of arson attacks followed. One destroyed Yanner’s house, another the council building. In 2002, someone torched a Coolabah tree on the Albert River blazed by explorer William Landsborough in his 1862 search for Burke and Wills, setting off fears that Aboriginal activists were intent on erasing the legacy of white pioneers.

But by 2015, the 150th anniversary of Burketown’s founding, the Century case had been settled by a court-initiated consent order with the state government. Millions of dollars were already flowing from the mine and the state into Aboriginal welfare and development projects. Large parts of Burketown were transferred to native title, including the town square, residential sites and industrial land, and the town now has an alternative Indigenous name, Moungibi.

Outside town, six pastoral leases came under Aboriginal ownership, making the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi the biggest landowners in the shire. Their commercial arm bought out many of the businesses in Burketown, including the pub, the garage, the airport, the tourism centre and the Savannah Lodge.

The Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council, from where these holdings are administered, is a kind of alternative government to the Burke Shire Council across the street, and the police and other Queensland government agencies.

“Most of Australia’s going to shit but here’s a place you can leave your key in your car, your house unlocked,” says Yanner. “Zero crime rate, no kids on the street, no mischief. No one beating their missus up, no one causing trouble. If they do, we restrict them access to our services and things and kick them out, because basically there’s dozens of people from less functional communities lining up to get in for their kids’ sake to a good community. We don’t do that with any state or government intervention, and deprivation of people’s rights, we do it ourselves: communally, locally. It’s far better than anything the government’s tried elsewhere.”

Doomadgee, to the west, Borroloola further along Highway 1 in the Northern Territory, and Mornington Island out in the Gulf are larger Aboriginal-majority towns notorious for problems of crime, addiction and poor health — and ineffective government interventions to deal with them. “The government doesn’t listen to the people’s ideas, or try out their ideas,” says Yanner. “They’re all concentration camps from the early days.”

He snorts at the idea of getting Aboriginal recruits into the police. “No, we wouldn’t accept it. They’d be the Jacky-Jackies. They’d be a tracker for them. Just like the old days. The only time Aborigines have been with the police is when you need an Aborigine to catch an Aborigine.”

Two of the shire council’s five members are Aboriginal, and a third is of Philippine descent, and Yanner says relations with the council are now cooperative. Ernie Camp, the mayor, concurs and adds to the account of community self-policing. “Sometimes it might be claimed nobody’s doing their parenting, single-parent families, but on the other hand everybody’s doing the parenting,” he says. “Everybody’s keeping an eye out, and certainly not going backwards in giving a shout-out if a kid may or may not be doing the right thing. It becomes community parenting, I suppose.”

Mutual advantage: Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp. Hamish McDonald

It’s not a community without problems, though. Youth suicide is a worry, Camp says, with one recent case involving a twelve-year-old, and social media grips young people who might previously have found solace looking after pet animals. Improving year-round road access would help reduce the sense of isolation, he thinks, as well as having national defence, biosecurity and a host of other benefits.

It still gets a bit fraught when, as mayor, Camp has to make a speech on Australia Day. He likes to use the analogy of a vehicle, with both a rear-vision mirror and a windscreen to look forward. “That’s the way life is, you need to have good vision going forward,” he says. “But we need to reflect on the past, and not to do the things again. It should be part of education to look back on history with no restrictions, and tell all.”

With our interview drawing to a close, Camp mentions how, in the midst of the heated negotiations over native title in the late 1990s, he was deeply touched when his three-year-old daughter wandered off from the family homestead and got lost in the bush. Yanner called and offered to bring out all his people in the search. (The little girl was found unharmed after many hours.) Anthropologist Richard Martin tells me that both sides had come to realise they could make native title and reconciliation work to mutual advantage.

The town now follows an annual cycle of tourism and cattle-raising set by the seasons. The three-month wet season, when the town is cut off by floods much of the time, is a wonderful, peaceful interlude, says Camp. “If you want to walk around naked all day you could — nobody’s going to bother you. Not that I’ve ever done it.” Then comes the annual barramundi festival, around Easter, timed so anglers can drive in from outside with the receding of the wet, but not so late into the cooler months that the big fighting fish has gone into semi-hibernation. Skilled fishers can still coax it to strike at the lure.

As the land dries out, it’s time for mustering the cattle. In September comes the unusual long cylindrical cloud formation known as the “morning glory.” Glider pilots fly their high-tech machines up from all over Australia to use Burketown’s airstrip as a base to ride its thermals.

Meanwhile, says Yanner, the Aboriginal peoples of the region keep up their traditions. “We are the only community in Queensland that still runs full tribal initiations here,” he says, holding an imaginary penis in one hand and bringing the other down in a slicing motion. “No painkillers, antibiotics, all that rubbish, no doctors, just the old days and the whole thing proper.”

The young float between the two cultures — among them Yanner’s son Mangubadijarri (“the barramundi jumping out of the water”), who has been studying law and international relations at Bond University on the Gold Coast and is currently managing the Burketown Pub.

One evening towards the end of my visit I took a “sunset cruise” run by the Aboriginal corporation’s tourism office. At the town jetty, I boarded a large, new steel barge and watched crewman Paddy Kunsing haul in a fine fish. Then we set off along the Albert River, the reddening sky reflected in its still waters.

Fish jumped along the shallows. A small crocodile lay on the mud. The crew broke out bottles of wine and beer, and laid out crackers, cheeses, olives and dips. My fellow tourists were eight well-off retirees on a bespoke tour of the Gulf, Cape York and the Torres Strait. Their pilot came along too, and extolled the capabilities of his aircraft, a Pilatus-12 turboprop with luxury seating that could still land on small, remote airfields.

Nevil Shute would certainly have cheered this aviation bit of the Burketown story. Who knows what he would have thought of Tony Abbott and his knighthoods, but I doubt he’d object to the notion of young Brits coming out to work on Australian farms under the proposed free-trade deal with the United Kingdom. And maybe he’d approve of the reconciliation painfully won in a town smaller but more inclusive than the “town like Alice” he envisaged. •

POSTSCRIPT, MARCH 2026

It was through another contributor, the late Robert Milliken, that I came in contact with Inside Story. Decades ago, Robert and I started as cadets on the Sydney Morning Herald the same day, so we went back a long way. He wrote principally for foreign newspapers and magazines, but also pursued burning interests in Aboriginal affairs, migration and other domestic things, first through Australian Society and then Inside Story.

My burning interests were more in Australia’s relations with the world, and with the receptive editorship of Peter Browne I found a platform to explore them and portray the people involved. Sometimes the suggestions came from Peter. Sometimes the stories suggested themselves. The occasionally clumsy initiatives of our politicians in Papua New Guinea and the Solomons; the experiences of Pacific islanders doing seasonal work on Queensland farms; the personal stories driving foreign ministers Marise Payne and Penny Wong. The strings at work in policy-making, through officials like Andrew Shearer and hybrid institutions like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute; the nobbling of critics in the China Matters think-tank by Scott Morrison’s consiglieri; the shock to the Australian cult of the military delivered by Justice Brereton’s war crimes report. And, of course, the worship of the ANZUS alliance turning into the cargo cult of the AUKUS nuclear submarines, and the whistling in the dark about Donald Trump.

Peter directed important books my way to explore great issues in long reviews. He gave the only sustained media space — outside the SBS Serbo-Croat service — to coverage of a judicial inquiry that followed my long-running investigation into an old terrorism case, the Croatian Six. When I pursued a story that looked then and now at the locale of popular fiction that established a romantic mythology about Australians — Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice — Inside Story was there to run the long story about my journey to that place in the Gulf country. So that’s the one I chose to represent my work for Inside Story.

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Some foreign ministers go on to be ennobled as governor-general: Richard Casey, Paul Hasluck and Hayden. But only one in living memory, William McMahon, sprang back from this political sidetrack into the prime ministership.

Present incumbent Marise Payne is notable for an absence of perceptible leadership ambition and what many say is an excessive aversion to the limelight. She is also part of a dwindling remnant of small-l liberals in the Liberal Party. Oddly, though, this has made her useful to Scott Morrison as he flounders around in gender and sexual violence issues. In March he made her chair of a new cabinet committee on the status of women, referring to her as “prime minister for women,” while making it clear he was still in charge.

Once, Payne had people wondering whether she had the makings of a prime minister. In 2001, four years into her first Senate term, clever, articulate and still only thirty-seven, she was asked by Radio National’s Terry Lane whether she would jump to the House of Representatives to advance her career. “The sort of Liberal Party that I would lead, I would hope would be a very inclusive Liberal Party,” she said, adding she was happy enough helping constituents sort out “issues and problems.” Just as well, for she was already on the outer in the Liberal Party.

She had been deputy to lawyer–financier Malcolm Turnbull during the Australian Republican Movement’s failed Yes campaign at the 1999 referendum, and had been upbraided by John Howard and Tony Abbott for this “conflict of interest.” As she observed ruefully at the Lowy Institute in 2018, “It may explain my extremely well-developed professional career as a backbencher in the Howard government.”

Further episodes didn’t endear her to Howard. As chair of the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee she declared one of his government’s proposed anti-terror laws “a very serious incursion into the way in which we currently expect to be able to live our lives in Australia.” Together with other Coalition moderates, she managed to have the legislation modified.

From her maiden speech in 1997 onwards she spoke of her concerns about refugees, the stolen generations, HIV sufferers and other minorities. Her foreign trips took her to places like Dili to observe the East Timorese independence referendum or Nepal to see Tibetans arriving across the Himalayas. As Norman Abjorensen noted in a 2008 profile for Inside Story, all of this meant her career under Howard was “a swim upstream.”

Howard embodied the hardline laissez-faire views of the Liberal Party’s NSW right, in the end going beyond the bounds of public acceptability with his WorkChoices legislation. Abjorensen contrasted this approach with Victoria’s Liberals, historically more secure and imbued with a certain noblesse oblige.

With members of the intolerant religious right stacking branches in New South Wales, Payne’s place on the Senate ticket was always under threat. She clung on in third place behind the right’s Helen Coonan and the top-ranked National. In a speech to the Sydney Institute in November 2008, the year after Howard’s defeat, she excoriated the party’s right for straying from the liberalism of Robert Menzies and showing “heartlessness” towards refugees.

Payne started to come in from the cold under opposition leaders Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull, both moderate NSW Liberals, who awarded her junior shadow portfolios in Indigenous affairs and foreign aid. Then, with experienced and talented women, or any women at all, in short supply in the Coalition, Abbott gave her the thankless human services portfolio. Later in 2015, following Abbott’s ousting by Turnbull, she became defence minister.

In that job, she gained accolades for her performance in question time and committees, and for her engagement across party lines. “I’ve always been quite impressed with her,” says crossbench senator Rex Patrick. “She never seems to be rattled by questions. She always seems to be well briefed and prepared.”

Momentous decisions were made  in the portfolio during her three years. Twelve French-designed submarines were ordered,  at a cost initially put at $50 billion (the troubled project is now expected to cost $90 billion), with an extra $10 billion to keep the six existing Collins-class submarines operating until they arrive. Nine British frigates, also still on the drawing board, were ordered at a cost of $35 billion, now blown out to $45 billion.

Few defence analysts believe Payne guided these decisions or questioned the advice leading to them. To critics like Patrick, a former submariner, it was a case of defence chiefs with little project experience selling a grand leap into the future to politicians with even less grasp of technology, warfare and industry. “I would say Payne presided over a number of decisions, particularly in naval shipbuilding, that will haunt Australia for years to come,” says Patrick, who adds that she should have picked up on very early signs that the French submarine deal was not going well.

In his memoir, A Bigger Picture, Turnbull mentions working with Payne on the 2016 defence white paper, though he details only his own interventions in the drafting. She was a “calm, knowledgeable and considered” minister, he writes. “But she lacked confidence in her own considerable ability and wouldn’t get out enough in the media to promote our Defence Industry Plan, which is why I later appointed Christopher Pyne minister for Defence Industry.”

Morrison’s dethroning of Turnbull in August 2018 saw Julie Bishop exit cabinet and later parliament. Needing another woman in his senior ranks, Morrison appointed Linda Reynolds, a major-general in the Army Reserve, as defence minister and made Payne foreign affairs minister.

Payne was hardly his cup of tea. Morrison had been the party’s NSW state director during the years she was stuck on the backbench and at risk of losing nomination. But she was a safe pair of hands who had kept any objections to refugee policy to herself since becoming a minister.

The contrast between Payne and her predecessor could hardly be greater. Bishop’s high-profile travels, lycra-clad early-morning jogs, daring haute couture and Paspaley pearls helped keep her in the public eye. Eight years older than Payne, she had once practised as a barrister (Payne had been a political staffer) and was well suited to the prosecutorial role she assumed after the downing of a Malaysian airliner by Russian-backed Ukrainian forces.

Far from the VIP tent, Payne remains a somewhat reclusive figure anchored in the middle and outer suburbs of Sydney, where she grew up as the daughter of an accountant. After attending Methodist Ladies College, she joined the Liberal Club at the University of NSW, aged seventeen, having just started her arts–law degrees. She has said the Liberals were the “natural choice” for her. These days, with her electorate office in Parramatta, she calls herself “senator for Western Sydney” rather than the constitutionally correct senator for New South Wales. Her home is in the Penrith state electorate of her partner since 2007, Stuart Ayres, a minister in Gladys Berejiklian’s state government.

From the outset, it was clear that a large part of her current job would involve cleaning up after her leader. During a by-election caused by Turnbull’s resignation from parliament, Morrison decided to try to appeal to the large Jewish population in the Wentworth electorate by announcing Australia would follow Donald Trump’s example and transfer its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Protests erupted in Indonesia and Malaysia, and farm exporters got worried. With backing from Payne’s department, the government called in senior foreign policy and trade figures — former ASIO and defence department head Dennis Richardson, former foreign affairs department head Michael L’Estrange, former defence force head Angus Houston, former prime minister’s department head Michael Thawley, and former Nationals leader John Anderson — to advise. All but Thawley said the move was a bad idea. In the end, a compromise statement said the move would be to “West Jerusalem,” not the united city claimed by Israel, and wouldn’t take place (except for a defence and trade office) until a settlement was reached with the Palestinians, who claim East Jerusalem as their capital. “We ended up with the extraordinary formula which is exactly the same as Vladimir Putin’s,” says one retired diplomat.

A year later, in October 2019, Morrison went down another Trumpian pathway. “We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia,” Morrison told a Lowy Institute dinner. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community and, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” He ordered Payne to do an “audit” of Australia’s membership of international bodies.

Her department complied according to the classic Yes, Prime Minister script. As Payne told ANU’s National Security College in June last year, it found that the hundred or so international agencies were “extremely important for Australia in terms of advancing our national interests and promoting and protecting our values.” She thanked Morrison for guiding her department to this conclusion. “We couldn’t have made that assessment without the multilateral audit.”

Beyond these defensive moves, Payne is not getting many plaudits. She is perceived by some as lacking energy and visibility, both in dealing with the world outside and in explaining the world to Australians. But figures in foreign policy circles are reluctant to talk about her on the record: they tend to admire her personally and think she has a hard row to hoe in this government, and they have contact with her in various forums.

“She does no harm, but she doesn’t do much good,” says one veteran of the Canberra political scene. “She has good instincts and a lot to offer but has she really pulled the government in a positive direction on very much?” asks an international relations academic influential in foreign policy circles. “Probably not.” The academic thinks that Penny Wong, her opposite number in Labor, would have made a bigger splash outside Australia and got the Australian public more engaged on international issues, had the 2019 election gone the other way.

As an example of actual harm, many point to Payne’s call in April last year for an “independent” inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. Under questioning from David Speers on ABC’s Insiders she suggested China had not been fully transparent and questioned whether the World Health Organization was the right body to carry out such an inquiry, given this would be “a bit poacher and gamekeeper.”

She was veering into Trumpland, and Morrison made it worse two days later by declaring the investigators would need “weapons inspector” powers.

Relations with Beijing were already heading south. As the eminent former Fairfax editor Max Suich wrote in a powerful analysis in the Australian Financial Review in May, two of Canberra’s most powerful figures, names undisclosed, told a closed-door Lowy panel in September 2017 that Chinese interference needed to be confronted. Turnbull was already preparing the foreign interference laws he would present to parliament that December with the declaration, in bad Mandarin, that Australia was “standing up” — a cheap take on Mao Zedong’s declaration of the People’s Republic in 1949. He soon announced that Huawei would be excluded from Australia’s 5G mobile network, and began urging other security partners to follow suit.

In other words, getting “out in front” of Australia’s allies, as Suich put it, in “calling out” and “pushing back” against Chinese interference and infiltration, began well before Morrison, though he continued and intensified it. The bill came in over the following months, with China blocking some $20 billion in imports from Australia on various pretexts. An international Covid inquiry did get launched in September, on European initiative and under WHO auspices, with both China and Australia voting in favour.

It was an own goal for Payne and Morrison. “She ended up holding the can for the Covid inquiry and I have no idea where it came from,” says the international relations scholar. “Was she ordered to do it, or did she actually want to do it? But that was a diplomacy fail from my perspective. We could have achieved the same objective without what became the consequences. That is what diplomacy is about: finding intelligent ways to negotiate or persuade, to get what you want, without the negative consequence.”

Three months after her inquiry call came Payne’s finest hour as foreign minister. More blunt than diplomatic, it recalled the Love Actually moment when Hugh Grant’s British prime minister rebuffs a sleazy US president. She was in the United States with defence minister Reynolds for the annual AUSMIN talks with their American counterparts, a week after US secretary of state Mike Pompeo had made a speech overturning decades of policy by declaring the Chinese Communist Party’s rule illegitimate.

Payne pointedly refused to back Pompeo’s call for allies to help roll back communism in China. “The secretary’s positions are his own,” she said at a joint press conference, standing beside Pompeo. “Australia’s position is our own.”

Back in Australia, Morrison continued to spring surprises. Anxious for a free-trade agreement with Britain post-Brexit, he agreed to Boris Johnson’s request that British working holiday-makers be exempted from the eighty-eight-day farm labour requirement to renew their visas. Then, to cover up the resulting fall in numbers in this highly exploitable group, he hastily agreed to a long-rejected push by the Nationals and the farm lobby for a new agricultural work visa for Southeast Asians, a recipe for future scandals affecting vital foreign relationships. As with the Jerusalem announcement, there was no sign of prior consultation with the foreign affairs minister.

If Payne has used her parliamentary seniority and rank in cabinet to push back on asylum seekers and other policies she finds too harsh, most outside observers can see little sign of it. The exception is an attempt, ahead of a feared Taliban return to power in Kabul, to persuade Home Affairs to grant asylum faster and less unwillingly to Afghans who worked with Australian forces and agencies. She was also said to be against the early withdrawal of Australia’s embassy.

Her efforts to support Australians in trouble are also noted. Freeing the Melbourne University academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert from jail in Iran last November required a complicated deal worked out by former ASIS chief Nick Warner, one-time ambassador in Tehran. He arranged for Moore-Gilbert to be exchanged for three convicted Iranian terrorists being held in jail in Bangkok, rewarding Thai prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha with a new “strategic partnership” with Australia — much-appreciated Western support for a military-backed leader who was vigorously suppressing anti-royalist demonstrators. Her concern for Sean Turnell, the jailed economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, is one reason she is holding off applying sanctions to the coup leaders in Myanmar.

On deeper policy, though, she is quite isolated, with Simon Birmingham the only other notable moderate in a cabinet stacked with punitive hard-right figures like former home affairs and now defence minister Peter Dutton and immigration minister Alex Hawke, who once worked for NSW religious-right powerbroker David Clarke.

This April she travelled to Wellington in a successful attempt to persuade her counterpart, Nanaia Mahuta, that New Zealand should stand closer to Australia in facing China. The NZ trade minister had earlier suggested Canberra try more “diplomacy,” and Mahuta questioned whether the Five Eyes intelligence pact was the right forum for a broader meeting of minds on the rise of China.

On this issue, Payne seems to have had little help from the punishers in the cabinet. The deportation of New Zealanders after even a one-year jail term has seen people raised from infancy in Australia (some of them steeped in Australian bikie culture and other criminal networks) dumped in their country of birth. Initiated by Morrison when he was immigration minister and ramped up by Dutton — who calls it “taking out the trash” — these “section 501” deportations have badly frayed the trans-Tasman relationship. To them have been added increasing numbers of “section 116” deportations, which require no criminal conviction at all but simply what one official calls the “I don’t like the look of you test.”

“To be fair, it’s a long-term problem, not Payne’s,” says the international relations academic. “Foreign ministers haven’t done enough to put their perspective strongly, to win the arguments in cabinet, to protect their department and make sure it’s funded properly. Foreign Affairs and Trade has continuously lost those arguments — the influence arguments, the funding. It just doesn’t have anything like the influence it used to have. You might ask: is that the minister’s fault or is the minister’s lack of influence a symptom of that?”

This is a shame, the academic adds, “because if you look at Marise’s parliamentary career there is just so much to like here. She is someone who genuinely believes in human rights and democratic processes, the machinery of good government. God, she stands out in the current government!”

Could anyone else have done any better? Probably not Julie Bishop. She was humiliated by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi early in her tenure, after Canberra protested against China’s declaration of an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea, and spent her last two and a half years as foreign minister frozen out of Beijing. By May 2018, Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador in Beijing, was writing that Turnbull “needs to replace the foreign minister with someone better equipped for the demands of the job.”

“If it was someone who had the most conceivable amount of heft in the cabinet, the domestic and international connections, would he or she have done better than Payne has done in the time she’s had?” the academic asks, providing the answer: probably not, under Morrison. “In which case she’s doing her best in a situation where there’s very little room for her to do more.”

The recent departure of her departmental secretary Frances Adamson for the SA governorship raises new questions. Will the loss of this career-long China specialist further weaken the department’s already diminished voice and further worsen relations with China? “I wonder how much of what’s happened in Foreign Affairs is a result of Frances Adamson,” says Rex Patrick. “We’ll only find that out as Kathryn Campbell takes over.”

Campbell, a major-general in the Army Reserve, is the new Foreign Affairs secretary. As secretary of Social Services, she carried the can for the robodebt scandal, but she has no discernible foreign experience beyond a brief attachment to a Middle East army base. Though Payne is said to have got on well with her as human services minister, it is unclear whose choice she is and what was Morrison’s purpose in appointing, or agreeing to appoint, her. Some have seen it as further “militarisation” of foreign policy. Conversely, Campbell might have the bureaucratic infighting skills to take on the security establishment.

Will Payne still be there to benefit? Many of the remaining moderates in the Liberal Party headed for the exit at the 2019 election, not attracted by the opposition benches or more time in a Morrison government. Sometime in the next ten months, Payne’s own place in the Senate will be up for election. She must be pondering whether to give up on the party she joined as a teenage girl or, as Menzies used to say, “keep kicking against the pricks.” •

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The Myanmar armed forces, the Tatmadaw, overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi following its sweeping electoral victory, bringing to an end the constitutional progress started a decade ago by Min Aung Hlaing’s military predecessors. Since the coup, soldiers have killed more than 800 demonstrators.

Adding to the cynicism of the whole affair, Min Aung Hlaing seems to have calculated that Suu Kyi’s lowered international standing — an ironic result of her defence of the Tatmadaw’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority — meant her toppling would not be greatly regretted by the outside world. The general’s claims of election fraud were a Burmese translation of those being made by Donald Trump. Myanmar was facing no national crisis at the time: the coup was all about his ambition and the Tatmadaw’s dominance.

Coming up to six months after the coup, the Australian government is still in two minds what to do. Should it join the United States, Canada and European nations in applying sanctions against Myanmar military figures and military-controlled businesses? Should it go as far as the Czech Republic, which has recognised the National Unity Government declared by the ousted civilian leadership? Should it work alongside the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’s softly-softly engagement while using bilateral contacts as leverage?

So far, the government has inclined to the last, safest option. But ASEAN is split between those with elected governments, like Indonesia and Singapore, urging harder pressure on their fellow member, and those with authoritarian regimes taking a tolerant attitude to the coup.

Australia’s military was directed to maintain contact with the coup leaders. Vice-admiral David Johnston, the deputy defence force chief, has had two phone conversations with his Myanmar counterpart, vice-senior general Soe Win, urging restraint and pressing for the release of the Australian economist Sean Turnell, an adviser to Suu Kyi. Turnell remains in Yangon’s Insein jail, now formally charged with revealing state secrets, one of the crimes with which Suu Kyi is also charged. The Tatmadaw trumpeted the conversations with Johnston as a step towards Australia’s acceptance of the coup.

An Australian version of the “Magnitsky Act” — the US legislation that initially applied financial sanctions to Russian leaders and kleptocrats but has since been used against figures in Myanmar and elsewhere — is yet to come before parliament, despite the bipartisan recommendation of a joint parliamentary committee last December. And the government doesn’t appear to have wielded its existing migration and foreign investment powers.

The listless response is not for lack of interest in Australia. About thirty federal members and senators across party lines belong to a Myanmar friends group, and the joint committee was quickly set up to analyse Australia’s response to the coup.

“That’s a level of parliamentary activity which is rare in this country,” says Chris Lamb, a former ambassador to Myanmar and president of the independent Australia Myanmar Institute, which is backed by several universities. “And there’s been very little response to that. It’s a country that probably has more political engagement at backbencher level than any other.”

The policymaking rooms of Canberra appear to be gripped by doubts that sanctions have any point beyond symbolism. In a joint committee hearing in April, Defence official Hugh Jeffrey saw no “silver bullet” in sanctioning the military. “The Tatmadaw is an institution that has been remarkably impervious to international influence,” he said. “We also need to provide options that incentivise the return to liberal-democratic governance.”

In the prime minister’s office, Scott Morrison’s national security adviser, Michelle Chan, is a former ambassador to Myanmar. Her term there in 2008–11 covered the transition from outright military rule to the present constitution, which gives the Tatmadaw blocking powers in parliament and control of key security ministries. An internal backlash against Chinese influence had prompted military overtures to Suu Kyi as an alternative to continuing Western ostracism.

“Targeted sanctions mostly do not work — they’re very much a political response,” says Trevor Wilson, one of Chan’s ambassadorial predecessors in Myanmar. “Look at the history, look at the facts,” he adds, citing Yugoslavia and other examples. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that targeted sanctions work.” But he admits he doesn’t have a better solution. “Certainly I don’t think we should go the other direction of approving the military coup,” he says.

Among the supporters of targeted sanctions is the Australia Myanmar Institute, which is aware that figures within government believe sanctions achieve no results and remove the possibility of leverage. “To which my answer is: what leverage?” says Lamb. “When you see Vice Admiral Johnston speak to his counterpart in Myanmar and see nothing happen, where is the leverage and where is the benefit?”

In fact, says Lamb, it’s hard to see what would be lost by applying sanctions. “The kind of sanctions we are talking about would be pretty narrowly targeted to a pretty small group of leading people in the military and their assets,” he adds. “I think you get your best leverage by showing the decent people in the army that there is a future for them in the country.”

Janelle Saffin, a former federal MP now in the NSW state parliament, is a long-time friend of Suu Kyi and influential in Labor policymaking. She thinks that if sanctions reduced Australia’s leverage in relation to cases like that of Sean Turnell, any loss would be insignificant.

“If I want sanctions I’d want them to be directed, targeted and meaningful,” she says. “I wouldn’t even go for Min Aung Hlaing; I’d go for the coterie around him who all get wealthy through him. I’d put judges in it, like the judge hearing the case against Suu Kyi. Other people, diplomats who spread slander that protesters are terrorists. If I was doing sanctions I’d do them so they hurt people who were culpable.”

While not going as far as formal recognition of the provisional anti-coup government, Saffin says Australia could step up “engagement” with the ousted civilian government. It could lobby the United Nations to maintain the accreditation of Myanmar ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, who came out strongly against the coup.

In the meantime, says Saffin, Canberra is “hiding behind” ASEAN, and not even speaking as clearly against the coup as Indonesia and Singapore. If and when the regional grouping gets to appoint a special envoy on Myanmar — a step adopted at an ASEAN summit in April but since stalled — she believes Australia should weigh in.

Lamb agrees. “There’s no reason why Australia shouldn’t be speaking like the Indonesians and Singaporeans,” he says. “Both of them have their ministers out there saying things. Not us.”

If the chosen envoy is a Thai, as rumour suggests, Canberra should not assume this would lead to a whitewash of the coup, says Saffin. The current Thai prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-Cha, is a former general who came to power through a coup himself. The Thais would not want to be seen as a “pushover,” says Saffin. Australia should be using its considerable influence in Bangkok, enhanced by the new “strategic partnership” signed last November by Prayut and Morrison.

All these experts lament the rupture of bilateral dialogue with China, which has maintained relations with the Tatmadaw but must be alarmed to see its southern neighbour drifting deeper into domestic conflict and potentially transnational crime. One sign of China’s hedging was an invitation to Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to send delegates to the recent centenary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party, which it did.

“It ought to be possible for grown-ups like Australia and China to separate the bilateral things that cause us so much grief and talk sensibly about a country like Myanmar,” says Lamb. “And if not directly, to do it through surrogates.”

Australia did have a call for a return to democracy inserted in the statement by the “Quad” summit in March, notably putting India and Japan more firmly on side against the coup. It is also understood to have helped extricate a number of political fugitives from Myanmar.

The position of some 1500 students from Myanmar here on study visas is meanwhile fraught with uncertainty, with Home Affairs proposing to transfer them to temporary protection visas when their study visas expire. No post-Tiananmen Bob Hawke gestures here. Within the Myanmar community, some finger-pointers are targeting the children and other relatives of figures working back home with the military regime.

Canberra’s diffidence is sending signals of its own. “I don’t see that having no discussions about sanctions, or producing the kinds of answers that Australia does, can do anything more than give some reassurance to the generals in Myanmar,” says Lamb. “What we do is also the counterpart to what we don’t. Not doing something is itself a statement.” •

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The odds of defence being a stepping stone to greater things are not high. “For the overwhelming majority of defence ministers over the last fifty years, it’s been a graveyard of political ambitions,” says ANU’s Hugh White, the gadfly of Australian strategists. “We’ve had a very long tradition of defence ministers being ineffective, and looking ineffective. Most defence ministers find it very hard to give the impression, to the public, to their colleagues, that they’re actually in charge of their portfolio. It’s rather that their portfolio is running them.”

On the other hand, Dutton is the most politically powerful figure to take on the portfolio since Labor’s Kim Beazley. “People speak of Dutton as a future prime minister,” acknowledges White, “and certainly he’s the first defence minister since Beazley that people speak of in those terms.”

Dutton’s most visible moves in the portfolio have been culture-war dog whistles. He reprimanded the navy for allowing a female twerking troupe to do a sort of “hello sailor” routine at the commissioning of its new supply ship. He banned anti-homophobia morning teas and rainbow-coloured clothing, saying, “We are not pursuing a woke agenda.” It’s par for the course from the man who voted against marriage equality and boycotted parliament during Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations.

But the new minister has also sent signals to two defence communities. Against the background of army inspector-general justice Paul Brereton’s report on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, he assured serving soldiers that the government “has got your backs” and pledged to prevent the sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, who helped uncover the alleged crimes, from getting further defence contracts. Ignoring Brereton’s advice and countermanding general Angus Campbell, the defence force chief, he allowed some 3000 present and former special forces personnel not accused of war crimes to retain their Meritorious Unit Citations.

Then he let it be known he was keeping to a minimum any secondments from the Department of Defence to his ministerial staff, instead bringing over trusted aides from Home Affairs. He wanted to keep out “skewed” advice from the department, Dutton told his and Morrison’s favourite interlocutor, 2GB radio host Ray Hadley. “I want to make sure that we’re looking at it objectively, in particular around some of the projects where there is a lot of money involved,” he said. “Decisions have been made in some cases I don’t think should’ve been made, or the contracting is inadequate.”

Thus, from the start, Dutton put himself at war, or at least in heightened hostilities, with both his department and his service chiefs.

White, who served on Kim Beazley’s ministerial staff before moving to a senior role in Defence, says it isn’t unusual for defence ministers to bring in outsiders for advice and employ just one or two departmental staff to navigate the huge defence bureaucracy. But it’s another indicator, he adds, that Dutton is “potentially the most demanding and potentially the most reform-oriented minister they’ve had in a very long time.”

John Blaxland, a former army intelligence officer and now ANU war historian, thinks Dutton’s early statements were carefully thought out. “He has been thinking about national security issues for quite some time, and he is iconoclastic. He’s not accepting the accepted wisdom as being good enough for the future. He’s challenging everything. He’s making a lot of people squirm. He’s making life quite difficult for people inside. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s causing considerable discomfort.”

So what is he challenging? “Querying the basis of decisions, from what I understand are first principles, challenging why we’ve done things the way we have,” says Blaxland. “And the thing is he doesn’t have any skin in the game. They’re not his decisions. And if anything, he’s quite happy to find things that might be a little untidy for some of his potential political competitors.”

Dutton has come to the job “with pretty good preparation,” agrees White, noting that Home Affairs has grown second only to Defence among federal departments in size and complexity. In fact, the two departments have come to overlap, with shared concerns about cyber and military technology security.

“The other thing is that Dutton comes to the job at an interesting time,” says White, “when people are talking up Australia’s strategic challenges in a way they haven’t done in your and my professional lifetimes. There was all the stuff about 9/11 and the war on terror, but nobody ever envisaged that was going to impose really high-order demands on the ADF. Now we’ve had Morrison, announcing the defence strategic update this time last year, saying the situation today resembles the late 1930s.”

This means the job of defence minister feels more serious at the moment, White adds. “I think that’s the way he wants it. He obviously wanted the job. And it is interesting to ask why he wanted it, what he thinks he can do with it. I believe he thinks Defence is in very bad shape, and not just bad shape administratively but bad shape strategically. That is, they don’t really know what they’re on about. They don’t just not know how to get things done, they don’t know what they’re trying to do.”

To a large extent, though, Dutton must work with major decisions already made: the $90 billion construction of French-designed Shortfin Barracuda submarines, the $35 billion build of nine frigates the size of second world war cruisers, the final delivery of the $17 billion worth of F-35 strike fighters.

Still to come is a decision on armoured fighting vehicles for the army, an order valued at up to $29 billion. As part of that, the government has just ordered a replacement of the army’s current force of seventy-five Abrams tanks with a new model, at a cost of some $1 billion. This suggests Dutton has gone with proponents of a “balanced” force structure, ready to cope with all kinds of conflict — not on its own, it’s hoped — rather than those favouring more “asymmetrical” forces to counter foreseeable threats. Assets like tanks would be kept for the Army Reserve, if at all.

With the first of the new submarines at least twelve years away, Dutton tackled the emerging capability gap with a $10 billion program to refit the navy’s six existing Collins-class submarines. A small Defence team has been assigned to look at “plan B” alternatives from Germany or Sweden in case the French design proves impossible, but so far this seems a bargaining tactic. “He’s holding the French feet to the fire,” says Blaxland. “They’re not at all comfortable with what he’s doing to them. He’s talking up alternative options to apply pressure on the French to deliver, on time and as close to the budget as possible.”

In terms of beefing up military capability in the shorter term, though, the two notable measures were announced by Morrison before Dutton moved into Defence: the plan to equip the navy and air force with longer-range missiles and establish a “sovereign” missile factory, and the expansion of the Northern Territory facilities to host the annual US Marine Corps training contingents.

If he wants to pursue more radical reform, both in force structure and force expansion, Dutton is seen as having the edge on Morrison, who has few developed views on strategic affairs and is wary about taking Dutton on.

But is Dutton up to the intellectual task? Hugh White says the “good news” is Dutton’s inclination to think outside the box. “The bad news is that I think his judgement looks likely to be extremely bad on the really key strategic questions about what exactly Australia should be doing to address the rise of China. He does seem to be beholden to the idea surprisingly common around Canberra that it’s worth going to war with China to prevent China becoming the dominant power in East Asia.”

Blaxland says much “skulduggery” is going on behind the scenes, and the two-week delay in announcing a Foreign Affairs replacement suggests that’s the case. This week we learned that Kathryn Campbell, secretary of Social Services and a major-general in the Army Reserve, will be the new head. The appointment ended one line of speculation: that Defence’s current secretary, Greg Moriarty, could be moved to Foreign Affairs, opening up that position for Dutton’s secretary at Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo. A former Defence employee with a dark view of world affairs, Pezzullo wrote the 2009 defence white paper that urged the doubling of the navy’s submarine force, which has since been adopted.

But Pezzullo might still have an avenue if and when the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, retires. Moriarty might be persuaded to move into that job, or Pezzullo could take it — “In which case he will be a good ally for Dutton,” says Blaxland.

Campbell’s appointment meanwhile extends a security-minded view across Canberra, and might worry those calling for more investment in diplomacy and aid. She has a technical background, and her Army Reserve specialisation was in signals. Apart from a short assignment in the Middle East as deputy commander of Australia’s task force in 2016, her career seems to have included no foreign postings.

If he does eventually get Pezzullo, Dutton will have a departmental head likely to encourage his questioning of the status quo. “He may well feel he’d really prefer to have his trusted old hand Mike Pezzullo by his side,” says Blaxland.

But Moriarty is said to be keen to stay in the job, and Blaxland sees advantages for Dutton in that. “In Greg Moriarty he’s got an extremely capable manager of the defence business,” Blaxland says, noting Moriarty’s experience as ambassador to Iran and Indonesia and as peacemaking envoy in Bougainville and the Solomons. “He has a pretty sophisticated understanding of where Australia fits in the great power equation.”

Moriarty is also “adept at playing the bureaucratic game,” says Blaxland. “My sense is that Greg Moriarty will capitalise on Dutton’s dynamism and drive, and also moderate possible excesses, if Dutton allows him to moderate them. It depends on whether Dutton trusts him enough.”

Hugh White also returns to the question of judgement and balance. “It’s easy to see that Dutton is in some ways a more powerful figure, a more formidable figure than almost any other of his cabinet colleagues,” he says, “but we don’t really have any idea of how bright he is, how effective he is.”

Although Home Affairs is an “administrative behemoth,” White goes on, “it’s hard to point out an actual policy question on which Dutton has done anything other than hang tough. And hanging tough has its place but it’s not the whole of good policy. Dutton has set himself up for a test, and I think it’s perfectly likely — notwithstanding he’s more formidable than any of his predecessors for a very long time — he will stick in the portfolio for a while, and in the end he will leave with the place still in a shambles.”

But perhaps Dutton will be hoping to move onwards and upwards before that becomes a possibility.

“Once upon a time Defence used to be a bit of a political backwater, but it’s becoming more and more a pivotal agency on the national stage,” says Blaxland. “We’ve seen that not just with the Covid vaccine rollout and taskforce, but with the prospects of great power conflict looming, increased investment in the defence industry, additional expansion and muscling up of the defence force. Dutton is seeing this as a strong base for potential future ambitions.” •

The post The best form of defence? appeared first on Inside Story.

Even in power, the former army general had been a much blander, if more successful, dictator than his predecessor Sukarno or contemporaries like Burma’s Ne Win, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.

So has David Jenkins’s long-awaited multi-volume biography missed its moment, at least for the wider reading public? This first volume suggests not. Written with Jenkins’s characteristic clarity and verve, and painstakingly sourced, it is an enthralling read. As the list of acknowledgements shows, he managed to speak with most of the key surviving figures from the Soeharto era before they died.

The knowledge Jenkins has garnered since he arrived in Jakarta in 1969 as correspondent for the old Melbourne Herald has been a long time brewing. The two scholars whose endorsements appear on the cover of Young Soeharto, Benedict Anderson and Jamie Mackie, both died some years ago. Rather than some Javanist feat of posthumous telepathy, their approval came from their close reading of the draft and their guidance as it proceeded.

There’s also a second question: does Soeharto deserve such a long and detailed study? This volume runs to some 500 pages and covers only the first twenty-four years of his life. Two more will follow, surpassing Herbert Bix’s Hirohito biography and equalling Ian Kershaw’s study of Adolf Hitler, though nowhere near Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (four 800-page volumes so far). Even then, Jenkins plans to take us only to 1966, when Soeharto pushed Sukarno aside.

The answer is yes. Soeharto ruled Indonesia for thirty-two of the seventy-six years since the republic was declared in 1945. Despite the subsequent shift to a popularly elected leadership, the country retains many important elements of the system he presided over: a military not entirely back in the barracks, powerful business conglomerates, and an ideology that stands in the way of a hard look at the violence of 1965–66 that enabled him to take power. Even now, Soeharto’s former son-in-law and present defence minister, ex-general Prabowo Subianto, could make a third try, perhaps this time successful, for the presidency.

The core of this volume is a highly readable narrative of some 300 pages, with debates and digressive detail pushed to the 200 pages of notes that most readers can skip. It shows how Soeharto overcame a troubled and impoverished childhood to become a “polite, clever and capable young man” at the forefront of Indonesia’s emerging military in 1945.

Dubbed “the smiling general” by one early hagiographer, Soeharto came out snarling in 1974 when a magazine called POP ran a cover article suggesting that, rather than being the simple anak desa (village boy) of the official story, he was the son of a member of the Yogyakarta royal family. His young mother, the story went, was married off to a village official when Soeharto, who accompanied her, was six.

Jenkins teases out this version, along with other speculation at the time about Soeharto’s origins, and even the improbable suggestion that he was the son of the Yogyakarta sultan himself. (The sultan was studying in Holland at the time, though some Javanese believed their semi-divine rulers capable of remote impregnation.)

The POP article appeared at a touchy time for the president. His ambitious internal security chief, General Soemitro, had allowed a clamour to build up about corruption and favouritism towards Japanese and local Chinese investors. Using the tried and tested method of pouring petrol on a fire, rival general Ali Moertopo’s Opsus (special operations) group pointed Islamic hotheads at a Toyota showroom. Neither general came out well in Soeharto’s eyes.

The article was Moertopo’s effort to regain favour through flattery. It failed miserably. Soeharto saw it as a slur on his mother that branded him illegitimate. As he had when students mocked his wife Tien as “Madame Ten Percent” in the belief she took a cut of government projects, he lost his cool, calling a press conference to denounce the story as unfactual and subversive.

The real story — long intriguing to psychopolitical analysts — is that Soeharto’s mother, aged sixteen, disappeared when he was six weeks old and was found hiding in the roof-space of a village house. She and his father split up, and the baby was placed with a village midwife. There followed a childhood during which the boy was shuffled between the households of father, mother and relatives.

Barefoot and sarong-clad, Soeharto gained a rudimentary secular education in Javanese-language primary schools, but also — while apprenticed to the noted faith healer Romo Daryatmo — a deep immersion in Javanese mysticism and, through the wayang (or shadow) theatre, a smattering of classical Hindu thought. Though nominally Muslim, Soeharto inclined to spiritualism until late in life, when the increasing piety that accompanied Indonesia’s growing prosperity impelled him to be more visibly Islamic.

This upbringing left the young Soeharto a cool, outwardly respectful but always distrustful person, observing traditional precepts to keep emotions in check and accepting the Mahabharata’s teaching that sometimes a prince has to kill in order to do the right thing.

His big chance came at nineteen, when Holland’s neutrality was swept aside by Hitler, and the Netherlands East Indies desperately boosted its defences against Japan. Accepted into the colonial army, he rose quickly over the next twenty-one months, completing a sergeant’s course just as the Dutch were surrendering in March 1942.

Discarding his uniform, he disappeared back to central Java, where a few months later he joined the Japanese-run police force. Again he excelled, winning the trust of his superiors. Then, towards the end of 1943, the adventurous intelligence officers of the Japanese Imperial Army’s Nakano school — partly inspired by T.E. Lawrence’s stirring up an Arab revolt against the Turks — set about raising a local military force, known as the Peta. Again, Soeharto advanced rapidly to become a company commander, with a rank equivalent to captain, by early 1945.

While many of the other volunteers saw the Peta as the nucleus of a future army for an independent Indonesia, Soeharto showed no sign of such feelings, though he was to claim otherwise later. He had signed up to the two armies keeping Indonesia under control for the pay, the food, the uniforms and a sense of belonging. When a Peta battalion revolted against its brutal and dissolute Japanese officers at Blitar in February 1945, the Japanese swept in, executed some of the Indonesian officers, and put Soeharto in charge of the disarmed troops. He stayed with them in a remote corner of East Java until Japan surrendered.

The disbanded Peta did indeed become the core of the Indonesian National Army that resisted the return of the Dutch. “Soeharto, blessed by luck and a born survivor, had had rather a good war,” Jenkins says. “He had served in two armies, first on one side, then on the other.” By August 1945, now aged twenty-four, he had “more military training by far, and more military experience, than perhaps 98 per cent of his fellow Peta officers, the men who would form the backbone of a new Indonesian army.”

Soeharto stood out from his contemporaries, most of whom were from the priyayi (gentrified) class, many of them educated in the Dutch language and European ways. Though his ability got him far, he was still an outsider, an aspect that Jenkins will no doubt show to be important later on.

This saunter through Soeharto’s childhood and its many settings, set against the last years of the Netherlands East Indies, is engaging. Most striking is its exposition of Japanese influence on the shape and doctrine of the Indonesian military. Jenkins was able to interview many of the Japanese officers involved in the Peta, including some who knew Soeharto personally, greatly illuminating a connection previously mapped by American and Japanese scholars.

The Japanese influence includes an emphasis on what they call seishin and Indonesians call semangat (spirit), and rigid obedience to compensate for any lack of firepower. It also, unfortunately, includes a lot of violence, by officers to their soldiers, and to civilians. As with Burma’s Tatmadaw and the South Korean army to some extent, the Imperial Army lessons live on.

David Jenkins’s second volume will cover the 1945–49 revolutionary war against the Dutch, with a third volume to deal with Soeharto’s career in the new Indonesia. Many will be looking forward to his account of the dramatic events of 30 September and 1 October 1965. On the pretext of an alleged plot against President Sukarno by an American-aligned “council of generals,” Lieutenant-Colonel Untung bin Syamsuri, one of Soeharto’s former underlings, led a pre-emptive coup by palace guards. The Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, endorsed Untung’s coup while Soeharto was in the process of quelling it, giving him an excuse to unleash the anti-communist purge that killed more than half a million PKI followers.

For more than fifty years, scholars have picked holes in Soeharto’s claim that the PKI made the first move. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey soon uncovered Untung’s former closeness to Soeharto and the role of a mysterious PKI agent called Kamaruzaman. More recently, the opening of the archives has revealed more detail. John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder showed how the army and the PKI were each waiting for the other to make the first move, at Sukarno’s feared imminent death if not before. In Beijing’s archives, Taomo Zhou found that PKI secretary D.N. Aidit had been telling Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai about plans to form a “military committee” to head off and confuse an army move. In The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder, Jess Melvin showed how the army was primed to kill the PKI membership.

So, whodunnit? Did the PKI’s Aidit tell Untung to move? Or was Kamaruzaman a double agent for the army who convinced the suggestible Untung that a council of generals existed and was about to make a move? Did Moertopo’s Opsus light the fire as well as pour on the petrol? If so, did Soeharto, perhaps channelling Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata, see the six generals murdered by Untung’s troops as a necessary sacrifice? That they included the more worldly, more senior-ranking contemporaries from Peta days did leave the field much clearer for him.

We await Jenkins’s verdict. •

The post Born survivor appeared first on Inside Story.

But there is a dark side to the region’s history, of course. The fields were cleared of volcanic rocks in the late colonial years by some of the 62,000 Pacific islanders brought here and to other sugar towns by the infamous “blackbirders.” Most of the forced labourers came from islands in what are now Vanuatu and the Solomons.

Behind the little wooden church that serves Bundaberg’s remaining descendants of those islanders is a memorial engraved with hundreds of names, mostly of young men from islands like Tanna and Malaita, who died more than a century ago of overwork and illness. The deaths were registered at the time, but the graves were outside the town cemetery and unmarked. The dry stone walls these “Kanakas” built from the rocks, and probably many of the graves, are now being cleared for more extensive farming.

The history still echoes. On land near the Hummock I saw the orange high-vis vests of workers planting sweet potato seedlings in a vast field. Three days later this work gang from Tonga was over near the road, their work almost completed at a Stakhanovite pace.

Talk to Pacific islander seasonal workers like these, and to the young foreign working holiday-makers in the area’s hostels, and you often hear the term “modern-day slavery.” Accounts abound of picking, planting and pruning paid at piece rates rather than the per-hour rates specified by the industry award, and of wages clawed back by excessive charges for poor-quality housing and other levies.

Bundaberg is not an isolated case, or even the worst. The same stories are heard in many other horticultural regions around Australia. The industry relies on a vulnerable, largely non-unionised pool of casual workers, some of them islanders brought here from nine neighbouring countries under the federal government’s Seasonal Worker Programme, a lot more of them foreign backpackers needing their eighty-eight days of farm work to renew their visas for a second year (or six months for a third year).

In a third category of exploitable labour are the mostly Asian workers variously called “overstayers” and “undocumented” who come into Australia on visitor visas and then either apply for refugee status — a process that can take three years while they go out and work — or go off the radar. An estimated 70,000 of them are working in rural Australia. Some were visible in a strawberry field I passed near Childers, a town inland from Bundaberg, and they moved nervously behind a line of trees when they noticed Geoff Smith and me looking at them.

“What’s the difference between 160 years ago and now?” says Smith, a retired construction worker and union delegate. With his wife Jane, granddaughter of a cane worker kidnapped as a boy from Tanna island in what is now Vanuatu, he provides pro bono pastoral care and advocacy for the many workers from Vanuatu among Bundaberg’s seasonal labour force.

Smith answers his own question: “It’s the aeroplane, rather than the schooner.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but with a kernel of truth.

According to Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary in the immigration department, exploitation of foreign workers has been on the rise in Australia. That has happened despite federal parliament’s passing the Modern Slavery Act in 2018, which requires employers with turnover of $100 million or more to report any such slavery in their supply chains.

“The issue is not just confined to undocumented workers but extends to migrant workers brought to Australia under a range of visas,” Rizvi writes in a book he’s finalising for publication. “Over the last six years, there has been a major increase in the misuse of visitor visas and the asylum system to bring in migrant workers, effectively as indentured labour.” Employers and labour hire companies are unlikely to be caught, he adds, and the penalties are comparatively minor. “The rewards from exploitation of migrant workers are substantial; the risks are small.”

But the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted this modern system of exploitation. With the numbers of foreign backpackers in the country down to about 50,000 from the usual 140,000, and with seasonal workers reduced to about 7000 from the pre-Covid 12,000, Bundaberg is sharing in a nationwide shortage of farm labour. At least temporarily, bargaining power has been reversed.

“There’s not enough workers to go round,” says a Bundaberg grower I’ll call Dudley. (He asked that his real name not be used.) “Once all this bullshit’s over and all the backpackers come back, the boot’ll be on the other foot. Now the boot’s on their foot, kicking our arses.”

Anecdotal evidence points to a lift in wages. “I had a bloke ring me the other day, and he’s whingeing that some other prick’s paying his workers a couple of dollars a bucket more than what he is,” Dudley tells me. “I said, mate, I was telling you this was going to happen.” A labour recruiter in Bundaberg tells of a sweet potato grower offering a bonus of $2 on top of the $24.90 hourly award rate, to be paid retrospectively if the worker stays at least five weeks.

The same recruiter says some growers are even willing to consider hiring local Australian workers. He has placed a few, including some with disabilities. Bundaberg has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, 11 per cent in the December quarter, but the recruiter says it’s hard to induce young people off the steady, if low, lifeline of JobSeeker for work that has a reputation of being short-term and brutally demanding.

“They have been shut out from the unskilled labour force and are now entrenched in the Centrelink system,” says the recruiter. “Some are only interested in putting down that they applied for our jobs, and 50 per cent don’t turn up if they are given positions. But it’s getting better, and we are committed to the 50 per cent who do turn up.”

The growers’ association’s Bree Grima says farmers increasingly rely on local workers. But the federal government’s offer of $6000 relocation assistance has not helped much in bringing in workers from elsewhere in Australia, she says, with only a 0.3 per cent vacancy rate in Bundaberg’s rental housing.

The labour shortage has allowed workers to bargain down charges in backpacker hostels, which are often tied to labour hire companies, or move to independent accommodation in motels. They can also pick the more congenial work — picking avocados, macadamias and passionfruit, for instance, rather than collecting sweet potatoes or watermelons in vast unshaded fields.

“I’m up on my cherry picker among the avocado trees,” says one British backpacker taking a break from his finance sector job back home. “I don’t have to talk to anyone and I can smoke weed all day.”

The islanders face more uncertainty. They’re here under the Seasonal Worker Programme, administered by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, or DESE, or are among the 2500 or so unskilled and semiskilled workers in the parallel Pacific Labour Scheme, run by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which targets a wider range of industries.

Coming from Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Tuvalu and Timor-Leste, they are normally tied to one employer — the seasonal workers for up to two consecutive six-month periods, the Pacific labour staff for one to three years. With the Covid crisis, workers have been allowed to stay in Australia after their visas expire. They are free to change jobs as they wish, though some seem unaware of this rule and others fear being dubbed absconders or unsatisfactory workers — and sent home — if they complain or seek a new job.

Two workers from Vanuatu I meet have worked around the Queensland towns of Emerald, Maryborough, Childers and Bundaberg, picking grapes, oranges and mandarins, watermelons and avocados. They’ve paid up to $230 a week for accommodation, sometimes for bunk space so tight they couldn’t sit up.

They mention “ethical” employers, naming one big avocado grower, and others who don’t fit that description. “One never explained the piece rate,” says one of them. “He changed it so it equalled the hourly rate for the fastest worker. The rest got lower. You didn’t have a choice.”

Both now have work with a grower who hopes to keep them long-term, one earning about $1500 a week on piece rates, the other around $1000 a week on the hourly award rate. They worry about illness, and whether the insurance the employer says it has taken out will actually cover them. “It would be better if we had proper healthcare like the Australians have,” one says. “We work here the same way, and pay tax — why not?”

According to ANU Pacific affairs experts Richard Curtain and Stephen Howes, some 48 per cent of seasonal workers are employed by four labour hire companies, and the rest by smaller labour recruiters or approved growers. The reliance on intermediaries creates a gulf between the islanders and farmers that contrasts with the goals of New Zealand’s longer-running Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme, which makes a greater effort to incorporate pastoral care for visiting workers.

Under the NZ scheme, island workers return repeatedly to the same farms and vineyards, and in some cases employers visit them in their home villages in the off-season. The aim is to build a group of workers “who keep coming back,” says Jill Biddington, an organiser with Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA in Sydney, who monitors Pacific island workers in Australia. “Australia just wants cheap labour. I’ve never seen an Australian farmer over there.”

In many cases, labour hire companies in rural Australia work closely with hostel owners, or operate hostels themselves. Until the pandemic, in fact, the hostels were the only channels for employment. Seasonal worker papers or a foreign passport were prerequisites and, says Geoff Smith, “locals didn’t get a look-in.”

One such hostel in an inland town is essentially a collection of temporary cabins, with gas burners in semi-enclosed spaces for cooking and a central block of toilets and showers. It was raining when I visited, and a group of backpackers sat out unpaid downtime looking at their computers and phones. One young woman pointed to a square camping tent for which she was charged $110 a week. Down the hill, two young men from Vanuatu pointed to a long corrugated iron shed where they live four to a room.

At my motel in Bundaberg, Aurora Garcia, a Spanish-Canadian backpacker, tells me she had paid $215 a week for a bunk bed at the inland hostel for several months early last year. The rooms were stifling hot in summer and frigidly cold in winter. The flammable walls meant that heaters weren’t allowed. The washroom was an open walk away, with three toilet cubicles and three showers for forty or fifty women, and the same ratio for men. When everyone returned from work late in the afternoon, the shower queue stretched across the compound. Then, eight people per gas burner, they tried to cook dinner.

“When I went down the hill to talk with one of the Vanuatu guys I met out picking, the manager came and ordered me back, and threatened to kick me out,” says Garcia. “It was like racial segregation: white backpackers up here, islanders down there, and no mixing allowed.”

She worked next at an avocado farm whose product was recently featured by a major national supermarket chain. There, she says, the supervisor exercised discipline fit for a military drill squad, ordering pickers who fell behind to do star jumps and push-ups as punishment.

Until February this year, a converted pub in Bundaberg housed nearly one hundred seasonal workers and backpackers, each paying $200 a week for a bunk bed, with up to twelve to a room. Some had been brought there when the owners, operating as an unauthorised recruiter, drove a bus out to Childers and recruited seasonal workers with the promise of better pay. According to Smith, they were delivered to growers nearer town and told that, as “absconders,” they were at risk of deportation if they complained.

Then, in February, the owners told the workers to move out, for reasons that are not clear. The move roughly coincided with a visit by Vanuatu’s high commissioner, Samson Vilvil Fare, who was told the exodus was to allow for renovations. When I went into the hotel to enquire, I was met by a young man who, in a menacing manner, ordered me to leave.

Vilvil Fare didn’t consider that the hostels he saw in Childers and Bundaberg met the standards he would expect from a “first world” country. “When I’m visiting those areas I am having lots of questions raised — I’m also dumbfounded, I’m shocked, I’m worried,” he tells me. Media reports about the conditions seem to have had no impact, and nor has academic fieldwork. “Since I’ve been here I haven’t seen much change when it comes to welfare for our people.”

Backpackers don’t usually have to endure these conditions for more than a few months; they aren’t generally saving money for their families; and they often have parental credit cards to fall back on. But Pacific islanders are much more culturally adrift and financially constrained.

Many don’t have the command of English needed to understand contracts, payslips, superannuation deductions, bank accounts, medical insurance, tax return requirements or avenues for complaints. Geoff Smith has to check they’ve cut off recurring subscriptions for phones, streaming services and so on before they leave, so that refunds of tax and super are not eaten up when they are eventually paid. Employers don’t explain how costs like airfares can be recovered. Young workers from the Polynesian islands in particular can have unrealistic expectations of how much money they’ll be able to send back for church projects as well as their own families.

Gouging is rife. The Bundaberg recruiter tells me of workers being charged $400 each for transport from work on the Sunshine Coast to a new workplace in Bundaberg. (A train fare is around $35.) “The contractors rip them off,” says Dudley, the grower. “Then the farmer gets the bad name for not paying the worker properly.” He now refuses to use labour hire companies, hiring individual staff himself.

The inclusion of female workers in the schemes has added the new problem of sexual coercion and assault. Geoff Smith says he’s been told of several cases where male islander team leaders tell women in their work gang, “You are my woman while we are here.” Smith says the problem is largely ignored. “The women don’t want to make a fuss. They have a fear of being sent home.”

Islanders unused to driving conditions in Australia are sometimes expected to drive work vehicles, or buy old cars to get to their workplaces, despite having experienced only the slow and sparse traffic back home. So far, says DESE, twenty-five seasonal workers have died in Australia since its scheme started in 2012, mostly as a result of car accidents or “pre-existing” illnesses. No one I met can remember any inquests. “Twenty-five is just extraordinary for such a small visa,” says Abul Rizvi.

Both of the federal departments administering the labour schemes are reluctant to comment on how they exercise pastoral care and enforce regulations. DESE says it is in the process of appointing “up to nineteen” “mobility officers” to carry out these roles, but it seems they will be located in state capitals. Last October the department announced that $9 million would be spent on seasonal worker welfare, and this April it gave $1 million to the Salvation Army for pastoral care.

Geoff Smith says he has only seen DESE officials when Vanuatu’s high commissioner came to look around Childers and Bundaberg, and after Bundaberg’s Federal hostel burnt down in July last year (without loss of life). Jill Biddington says she has never seen any DESE officers in the field and suspects most are satisfied with photos sent by hostel operators. “No one is enforcing standards,” she says. “It’s all self-regulation, tick-a-box stuff.”

The Fair Work Ombudsman’s office says it pays special attention to complaints by the vulnerable migrant workers, and has an agreement with the Department of Home Affairs that they won’t be subject to visa action for complaining. In 2019–20, it says, 44 per cent of matters it took to court involved visa-holder workers. The total amount recovered for these foreign workers was $1.7 million, while the ombudsman also won nearly $3 million in court-awarded penalties. Only 12 per cent of the cases the ombudsman acted on were in agriculture, forestry and fishing. Rizvi’s observations about the odds of getting caught and penalised, or even exposed, seem to hold.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade set up a Pacific Labour Facility to administer its Pacific Labour Scheme in October 2018. At some point the facility was outsourced to the international private aid-management company Palladium. Its office in Brisbane refers media queries to the department. Former foreign minister Julie Bishop, who supervised the disbanding of the widely admired AusAID agency within her portfolio and a huge reduction in Australia’s foreign aid program, joined Palladium’s board soon after she left politics in 2019.

Amid widespread criticism that the Pacific and backpacker schemes lack proper supervision at ground level, calls are being made for responsibility to be shifted. Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA’s Biddington suggests the Seasonal Worker Programme be shifted from DESE to Foreign Affairs. “DESE just fails to have the sensitivity needed for working with people from different cultures,” she tells me.

No one is suggesting that the two Pacific island worker schemes should be scrapped. When they work well, they allow villagers from nine Pacific nations to learn new skills and work practices, and to save up several thousand dollars to invest in small businesses, cyclone-proof housing or higher education for their children. While much official aid gets consumed by urban political elites or recycled back to Australia, the two schemes direct money from Australia to productive, grassroots use. They also build people-to-people contacts between Australia and its inner ring of neighbours.

But the behaviour of some labour hire companies and farmers risks tainting some Australian products — meat, fruit, vegetables and wine — with the modern slavery label, and denying them certification as ethically sourced. This would be a propaganda gift to countries smarting under criticism for their own forced labour. China and Xinjiang leap to mind. Trade sanctions could follow.

With the federal government now predicting international travel will not open up until mid 2022, regions like Bundaberg face another year of labour shortage. Rather than waiting and hoping for the old conditions to return, Australia could seize the opportunity for structural change in the regional labour supply, and implement measures to disperse backpackers around a wider range of sectors, increase opportunities for workers from the Pacific, and get Australians into the farm work from which they have been effectively excluded. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Four days earlier, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited a naval base on Hainan island for the commissioning of three new warships, including a giant amphibious landing vessel capable of putting hundreds of marines ashore by helicopter and hovercraft. Two more are under construction, and Chinese media listed Taiwan among their potential targets.

Here in Australia, Michael Pezzullo, the powerful secretary of the home affairs department — a man given to dark warnings — spoke on Anzac Day about the “drums of war” beating louder, declaring the need to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s by arming to deter aggressors.

In Canberra’s political, official and media circles, Taiwan is suddenly a big strategic question. Will China use force to gain control of the island of twenty-four million people it claims as ancestral territory? If so, when? How far will the United States go to defend it? And if Joe Biden is drawn into a war over Taiwan, will Australia be fighting alongside him?

Answering the last question is possibly the easiest for many of our most seasoned officials. “There’s absolutely no doubt that if the Americans were to go to war over Taiwan we would be in it,” says John McCarthy, a former Australian envoy to the United States, Japan, Indonesia and India.

“Australia is not a major player,” Cavan Hogue, a former ambassador to Russia, South Korea and the Philippines, tells me. “But if the Americans decided to defend Taiwan they would expect us to join in — or at least offer our flag even if the military contribution were minimal.”

The Americans would be hoping for a fair bit more than that, says Scott Harold, a senior China analyst with the RAND Corporation think tank in Washington. “US policymakers would be expecting, at a minimum, intelligence support, political-diplomatic support, probably facilities access of some sort,” he tells me, adding it would not be surprising if Washington also expected some “niche” capabilities, such as special forces, anti-submarine operations and air and surface ship deployments.

The Australian Defence Force has spent decades working up the capability to join in such an operation. The navy operates three Aegis destroyers that can be networked into a theatre air-and-missile defence system. Its submarines have American combat systems and weapons. Its two landing ships can each carry a battalion of troops to take back islands. The air force flies American F-35, P-8 and Wedgetail aircraft. All three services have senior officers rotating through US command positions. Seamless “interoperability” with US forces is the doctrine.

It would be hard for Canberra to decline. “If we lost a war against China over Taiwan and Taiwan was forcibly absorbed, and our allies stood on the sidelines,” says RAND Corp’s Harold, “then it’s quite clear that would be the end of the liberal international order in the Indo-Pacific, and quite possibly worldwide.”

Even if the United States did fight off a Chinese assault on Taiwan without visible help from Australia, it would mean the effective end of the ANZUS alliance, according to Australian strategic thinker Paul Dibb.

Only in recent years has a war of this kind become a contingency that the United States and its allies needed to worry much about. In the early decades after nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his Kuomintang forces in 1949, it became something of a pariah state. Washington transferred its recognition to Beijing in 1979, leaving the Chinese nationalist regime in Taiwan in a kind of diplomatic limbo. American defence assistance was promised only so long as the Taiwanese didn’t start a fight with China or provoke one by declaring independence.

But circumstances began changing after Chiang’s son ended martial law and his successor, a native of Taiwan, opened up contested elections. Since then, government has alternated between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party, which promotes a Taiwanese identity and has veered close to outright separatism.

Under president Tsai Ing-wen, the DPP has held power since 2016. Elections, a female leader, and liberal social policies have made it a successful testbed for Chinese democracy. Its handling of Covid-19, a danger it recognised before Beijing sounded the alarm, has added to its kudos. The transformation has weakened the argument, still held in some quarters, that Western powers and Japan, with their records of meddling and exploitation, should stand back and let two not-entirely-admirable Chinese regimes settle their differences.

Rather than the convergence many expected in the 1970s, the democratic transition set Taiwan on a path of political divergence from the communist mainland. The gap has widened, especially since Xi became China’s leader, tightening internal political and ideological control, promoting an expansion of China’s global influence, and crushing hopes of autonomy in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. He has raised the recovery of Taiwan to a sacred goal and has devoted huge budgets to converting the People’s Liberation Army into a high-tech force that can contest American control of nearby seas.

Xi’s deadline for taking back Taiwan is unknown. It is unlikely to be the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China in June this year — the preparations would have been apparent to US satellites. Xi himself has set 2035 as a target for some of his other plans.

In recent weeks, US Pacific fleet commanders have signalled to Washington their concern about a window of vulnerability within the next five or six years, before their own modernisation programs take effect. Scott Harold points out that America is responding to China’s growing power by dispersing its forces from bases vulnerable to Chinese strikes. It could be seen as a window of opportunity closing for PLA commanders.

Would Xi risk an all-out attack on Taiwan? It would almost certainly involve missile strikes on US bases in Japan, drawing Japan into the conflict by triggering the carefully drawn provisions about self-defence in its constitution. PLA generals talk about using nuclear weapons, which would invite retaliation in kind, shattering the carefully built-up economy and perhaps the party’s domestic grip.

“Would a communist regime really put those equities at risk when Xi Jinping knows that as long as I don’t do something incredibly stupid, I’ll still be the effective emperor of China tomorrow?” asks Harold. But hidden power plays within the Chinese Communist Party could work a different logic: “Xi could be pushed to be more hawkish than anyone else.”

Mark Harrison, a China specialist at the University of Tasmania with a deep knowledge of Taiwan, thinks all-out invasion is highly unlikely. China’s leaders know that seizing the island would be just the start, involving an occupation force of hundreds of thousands of troops who would be vulnerable to blockade. “It’s a crisis that would go on forever, and be incredibly testing of the PLA and China’s military infrastructure,” he says.

“Australia would be involved” in such a large-scale scenario, says Harrison. “But China is more likely to act in a way that makes it much more equivocal for the US and its allies, including the Taiwanese, about their best response. What we’re much more likely to face is a smaller event where you don’t have a clear choice. And Beijing will seek to use that to its tactical advantage.”

Smaller operations could include grabs for the Taiwan-held islands on the Fujian coast — islands like Kinmen, which the nationalists held against attack in the 1950s, or the remote Pratas islands in the South China Sea.

“It’s almost a version of grey-zone coercion,” says Harold, referring to China’s use of swarms of fishing boats and coastguard vessels to push its maritime claims. “A little bit beyond that because it’s actually occupying territory and kills a limited number of Taiwanese people. That’s a pretty serious threat, and to not respond to it would feel a bit like the militarisation of the Sudetenland” — Hitler’s occupation of German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

“There would be some people saying it’s either this or we fight the big war, and are we going to fight the big war over this small thing?” Harold adds. “The reality is that’s how status quo powers get manipulated by aggressive, risk-accepting, risk-manipulative rising powers.”

Since taking office, US president Joe Biden drawn Washington back behind the Chinese “red lines” that Donald Trump trampled all over when he sent high-ranking officials to Taiwan. But his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has declared “rock-solid” support for Taiwan, and supplies of missiles, extra F-16 fighters and other advanced munitions continue. When Biden met with Japan’s Yoshihide Suga the two leaders reiterated their support for “peace and security” in the Taiwan Strait — a coded signal that alarmed Beijing.

“In a sense,” says Harold, “this is in some ways more threatening because it suggests the US is returning to a recognition that it needs to be an active leader, not necessarily the only one but certainly the most capable one among others. If you look at the calculations of Tokyo and Canberra, clearly those are much more closely aligned with trying to respond to and support Taipei’s continued de facto independence from Beijing.”

Taiwan itself has been angling for more explicit support from Canberra, notably during a long interview with foreign minister Joseph Wu on the ABC last year. Some analysts see a division between Australia’s defence and foreign affairs departments. But foreign affairs secretary Frances Adamson, who has served in Beijing and Taipei, told a Senate estimates inquiry that Canberra had made several representations to China about Taiwan recently. Nor are defence secretary Greg Moriarty or his deputy secretary for strategy Peter Tesch — both former ambassadors — noticeably pushing for change. ADF chief General Angus Campbell says a conflict over Taiwan would be “disastrous.”

Australia’s official position is still strictly “one China” — that Taiwan is part of China — while urging that reunification happens by consent, which is now a forlorn prospect. Yet reports do suggest that the defence department is updating its scenarios for Taiwan to include some major military assets. ANU strategic expert Brendan Taylor sees this move as a response to pressure from Washington for Canberra and Tokyo to add their weight to American deterrence.

“Because of the capabilities that the Chinese have been developing it’s going to become more and more difficult for the Americans to come to Taiwan’s defence in the way they were able to, not without cost but relatively easily in the past,” says Taylor.

Harrison, at the University of Tasmania, sees no likelihood of an upgrade in relations with Taiwan. “There is a view in certain quarters that Australia is particularly belligerent towards China, but that really isn’t the case,” he says. “In really significant areas — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang — Australia’s actually been very reticent.”

Canberra’s loudest drumbeat of war comes from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose dire scenarios are lapped up by the media and some politicians. “The place is getting a lot hotter under the collar than it should,” complains former ambassador McCarthy. “Everybody is whipping everybody else up.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The Taliban are already moving openly around the fringes of Kabul and in the countryside of Uruzgan province, where the Australian taskforce operated up to 2013. The veterans, along with many others, will no doubt be asking whether Australia’s longest military campaign, which saw forty-one soldiers killed and hundreds injured physically and mentally, was doomed from the beginning.

Brereton’s report is an opportunity to extract honour out of this sorry failure. Even in the redacted form released on 19 November, it offers a devastating inventory of killings and mistreatment of civilians and captives by Australia’s special forces, mostly from the Special Air Service Regiment, or SAS. It finds plausible evidence of thirty-nine unlawful killings by twenty-five soldiers, and recommends war crimes investigations of nineteen of them.

Six weeks after Anzac Day, a federal court will start hearing the defamation case brought against Nine Entertainment by the highest-profile of the former SAS troopers, Ben Roberts-Smith, over allegations he participated in war crimes in Afghanistan. Those stories have been given new life by Sunday’s fresh revelations on Nine’s 60 Minutes.

The Morrison government moved quickly to implement Brereton’s recommendation for war crimes trials by setting up a new Office of the Special Investigator within the home affairs department. Led by Victorian judge Mark Weinberg, its director-general is former attorney-general’s department secretary Chris Moraitis, with one-time Queensland Police deputy commissioner Ross Barnett as director of investigations. Weinberg was the sole dissenting judge on the Victorian appeals panel that upheld the conviction of Cardinal George Pell (later quashed unanimously by the High Court); his appointment suggests the government wanted someone unlikely to let emotion override reasonable doubt.

Brereton didn’t expect quick results, and nor did anyone else. The new office is still assembling the team of investigators who will go through the evidence collected by Brereton and separate Australian Defence Force inquiries and winnow out what is admissible, what is protected by promises of immunity, and what needs to be re-sworn.

If this process involves taking fresh statements from Afghan witnesses, an article by Kabul-based journalist Andrew Quilty in the current Monthly suggests it will be fraught. As Quilty found in Uruzgan in January, most potential witnesses live under Taliban control, some even joining the Taliban in reaction to the killing of relatives. Many claim Brereton missed numerous other cases.

In the Roberts-Smith defamation case, Justice Anthony Besanko has ruled that four Afghans who claim to have witnessed unlawful killings will be allowed to testify by video link — a process Justice Weinberg might also employ. Even so, it will take years for cases to be forwarded to the director of public prosecutions and for trials to be held.

Brereton also made recommendations that needn’t wait anywhere near as long, and here the Morrison government, the defence department and the ADF are showing little sign of progress. Among these is the question of compensation for Afghan civilians harmed by Australian actions.

“In cases where it has found that there is credible information that an identified or identifiable Afghan national has been unlawfully killed, Australia should now compensate the family of that person,” Brereton argued. “Doing so will contribute to the maintenance of goodwill between the nations, and do something to restore Australia’s standing, both with the villagers concerned, and at the national level. But quite aside from that, it is simply the morally right thing to do.” This process need not wait on convictions, he added.

Prime minister Scott Morrison’s initial response, last November, wasn’t encouraging: “That is not a matter that’s currently being considered by the government at this stage.” This appears to remain the government’s position.

Perhaps work is proceeding behind the scenes? When I put this question to the defence department I was told that it is still developing “a comprehensive implementation plan” for Brereton’s recommendations. “This includes working with relevant agencies to provide advice to government on issues such as compensation,” said the department. “Final decisions related to compensation (including relevant processes and procedures) will be a matter for the Australian government.”

One possible complication involves the interaction of compensation payments and war crimes trials. Could compensation payments, which assume specific killings and injuries were unlawful, undermine the presumption of innocence for soldiers charged over the incidents? Clive Williams, an ANU security expert and former intelligence official, says this is a real risk. He points to the precedent created by the International Criminal Court, which ordered a convicted person to pay compensation to victims after being convicted.

Ben Saul, professor of international law at Sydney University, doesn’t share that view. Recognising Australia’s responsibility by paying compensation “does not prejudge the criminal liability of individuals,” he tells me. He sees an analogy with Australian state government schemes that make payments to victims of crime “regardless of whether an offender has even been identified, let alone criminally convicted; the former does not prejudge the latter in any way.”

But defence lawyers in any war crimes trials will undoubtedly question whether alleged victims of Australian actions are in fact civilians. “It’s common for local villagers to support Taliban insurgents in some way — whether they want to or not,” says Williams. “This could involve spotting for them to let them know when to detonate an IED [improvised explosive device], for example, while seemingly engaged in innocent farming activity.” They wouldn’t qualify as armed insurgents, he says, but it “does make them party to an attack on our soldiers. This has led in the past to items being planted on spotters by frustrated International Security Assistance Force soldiers to justify shooting them.”

The money itself isn’t the issue: the compensation is unlikely to break the Australian treasury. From 2009, while operating in Uruzgan, the military ran a scheme that made “expeditious non-liability payments” for property damage, injury or death resulting from military actions by deployed forces. The 2836 payments made before the troops’ withdrawal in 2013 totalled $206,937.

An existing compensation scheme heavily funded by international donors but run by the Afghan government is supposed to pay about US$1300 for every civilian killed in action by Afghan, American or other forces, and US$650 per wounded civilian, says Williams. In reality, he adds, the victims’ families seldom receive any money. “Afghanistan is such a corrupt society that any money paid by Australia for victims’ families is likely to be considerably diluted, with corrupt middlemen, distant relatives and the local hierarchy all taking their cut.”

A better option, he says, might be to determine what the victims’ village needs — a well, electricity, access road, mosque or school — and find a way of providing it. “Another option might involve funding a scholarship for a victim’s younger family member. It should be noted that the Afghan government has limited control below the district level, which would probably mean having the Taliban manage the payment process, which could also present difficulties.”

But Williams doubts compensation will change Afghan attitudes towards Australia. “As far as most Afghans are concerned, we are just lackeys of the Americans. I agree that paying compensation is the moral thing to do, but it’s going to be very difficult to deliver a satisfactory monetary outcome for the alleged victims’ families.”

Among Brereton’s other challenging recommendations is his call for soldiers who helped his inquiry to be spared any penalty. Those who witnessed and then disclosed summary executions, but didn’t participate themselves, should be promoted, he recommended. Those who admitted participation on the understanding that it wouldn’t be used against them should not receive “adverse administrative action.” This “will be an important signal,” Brereton wrote, “that they have not been disadvantaged for having ultimately assisted to uncover misconduct, even though implicating themselves.”

It’s not clear whether the armed forces are following that recommendation. On 24 March, army chief Lieutenant-General Rick Burr told the Senate’s defence and foreign affairs committee that seventeen defence personnel had so far faced “administrative action” on the basis of Brereton’s findings, with eight sacked. Some officers were among those facing dismissal, he said, though he refused to go into detail on privacy grounds.

Questioning by senators did not clarify whether the seventeen included whistleblowers. Some newspaper reports have said that soldiers potentially facing war crimes charges have been allowed to take a medical discharge, allowing them to retain certain veteran benefits.

When I asked the defence department about whistleblowers, I was told that the army had “initiated administrative action for termination of service against a number of individuals where failure to comply with Australian Defence Force expectations and values was identified.”

Need for change: the chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, after delivering the Brereton inquiry’s findings in Canberra on 10 November 2020. Mick Tsikas/AAP Image

The department and the ADF are also looking at other Brereton recommendations about the culture of the military, command responsibility, and internal reforms. Not surprisingly, the most fraught issue has been the question of ultimate responsibility for war crimes. Brereton attributed blame to a clique of non-commissioned officers in charge of operational patrols, in the SAS’s case with their junior officers out of sight in overwatch positions. A cult-like “warrior” image put these NCOs beyond challenge, with complaints by Afghan civilians tending to be dismissed as Taliban-inspired.

Brereton’s finding that the abuses escaped the attention of lieutenants, captains and their superiors is something many find hard to believe. Indeed, army legal officer Major David McBride heard many soldiers expressing concern about unlawful killings and tried to convey them up the chain of command. Frustrated by Defence and Foreign Affairs stone-walling, he gave the information to the ABC. For that, he is now awaiting trial on several serious charges.

The inquiry into command responsibility is being overseen by a generation of senior officers who served with the Australian task force in Uruzgan, in the SAS or in other positions connected to Afghanistan. The current defence force chief, General Angus Campbell, was commander of Australian forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan for part of the period, though based in the Gulf. Andrew Hastie, who became assistant defence minister in December, was an SAS troop commander in Afghanistan in 2013.

In the Senate hearing last month, Greens senator Jordon Steele-John bluntly told Campbell he should resign. “I think you’ve joined a distinguished list,” Campbell replied. At the same hearing, independent senator Jacqui Lambie, an army corporal in earlier life, seemed to suggest soldiers had been misled into cooperating with the inquiry by ANU sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, whose preliminary findings led to the commissioning of Brereton.

Lambie’s comments fit with the view that NCOs were left to do the dirty work while officers kept their reputations. One of Campbell’s first actions in response to the Brereton report was to remove the unit citation — shown in a bronze bar worn on the uniform — from some 2000 special forces soldiers who served in Afghanistan. After a campaign by the Sydney tabloid Daily Telegraph, radio shock jock Alan Jones and SAS veterans arguing that this was collective punishment, Scott Morrison overruled Campbell and restored the citation.

Campbell was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his command in the Middle East and Afghanistan in 2011, when some of the alleged crimes happened. Of the eighteen commanders of the task force in Uruzgan, twelve got the DSC, or a bar to it, for their service there. So far, all have retained these honours.

But two of the eighteen, Brigadier Ian Langford and Lieutenant Colonel Jon Hawkins, tried to hand back their medals after Brereton’s report was released. Campbell told the Senate committee he had urged them not to act “emotionally” but wait for “a sensible reform plan to be developed, and give opportunity for me and others to be more systematic in the approach we take.”

This is part of a broader study of cultural change and organisational reform taking place internally, supervised by an “independent oversight panel” made up of former inspector-general of intelligence and security Vivienne Thom, former attorney-general’s department secretary Robert Cornall and University of Tasmania vice-chancellor Rufus Black. No detail has been released about the scope and timetable for this study, or who will be invited to contribute.

One small bombshell was dropped on 13 April when the Australian reported that a colonel working on these reforms had himself been photographed, as an SAS major, taking part in a puerile drinking session in the unauthorised bar known as The Fat Lady’s Arms inside the Tarin Kowt base. In their Senate committee testimony, generals Campbell and Burr indicated any soldier involved in this breach of discipline should be sacked.

Not only are there many problems within the forces to review, but their causes also run deep. Military historian Peter Stanley, a former Australian War Memorial staffer, believes they can be traced back to the creation of a standing regular army, replacing Australia’s citizen military force, after the second world war. “One consequence of that profound change,” he says, “has been — it is now sadly all too clear — the creation of an army which is unduly insular and distant from broader Australian society.”

Before then, part-time soldiers lived in every community; now they are mostly regulars based in places like Townsville and Darwin, away from where most Australians live. “That has had several lamentable consequences,” says Stanley. “First, it’s made soldiers separate from the nation, and it’s allowed an insular military culture to develop. Even worse, the decision to create an exclusive SAS and to allow it to develop in isolation not just from Australian civil society but also from the regular army has now been shown to be disastrous.” The undue reliance on special forces, he says, has proved a folly.

“Second, it’s now clear that while Australian society as a whole has become more liberal, tolerant, inclusive and generally ‘softer’ over several decades, the culture of the ADF, and especially the SAS, appears to have become increasingly at variance,” says Stanley. “While several chiefs have addressed this — notably David Morrison in his celebrated and justified video address — and the ADF has embraced diversity, the SAS culture both in Australia and on operations has remained so doggedly entrenched and insular as to be unquestionable — until now.”

Stanley wonders whether the Breaker Morant legend also conditioned many Australians. “Largely as a result of the 1981 film there was a change towards regarding Morant as either a victim of imperial injustice or at least a man traumatised in war whose crimes were understandable.” Although the movement to secure him a pardon failed, Stanley wonders whether sympathy for Morant means that many people regard crimes like those documented by Brereton as a natural part of war. “They aren’t, of course — war crimes are a product of both the specific conditions of a war but also the society that goes to war and sends its citizens to war.”

Stanley says that “armies embody values,” and that the reaction to the Brereton report made it clear that “many Australians consider that members of our army have transgressed values we hold… It can never be acceptable for Australian soldiers to deliberately kill civilians, and that seems to be an essential starting point for considering the implications of the Brereton report.”

Australia’s armed forces need to go through the “painful” cultural reform that armies in countries like Germany and South Africa needed to undertake. “I’m greatly heartened by the way senior officers, and especially Angus Campbell, have spoken about the need for change,” says Stanley. “Though how far up the chain of command and how far back restitution needs to be imposed is a moot point. But they seem to understand that the culture Australian soldiers have operated within needs to be challenged.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Brereton’s unfinished business appeared first on Inside Story.

One witness was Ian Cunliffe, a former federal government lawyer who’d served on Justice Robert Hope’s late-1970s royal commission into the intelligence services. He had seen an Indonesian signals intercept concerning the Balibo deaths that he felt had been covered up.

Asked by his lawyer if he knew of other instances of intelligence being withheld from the government, Cunliffe instanced “a criminal trial in Sydney involving six defendants.” Canberra officials had agreed to keep material from the prime minister, he said, and had been willing to make intelligence material disappear if it was subpoenaed by defence lawyers.

During the court’s morning tea break, I asked Cunliffe which case he was referring to. “The Croatian Six,” he replied cryptically.

I had only the faintest recollection of the details of a case that had gripped Sydney nearly three decades earlier. As a young federal press gallery reporter I’d seen Labor’s Lionel Murphy and the Liberals’ Ivor Greenwood, two QCs from different sides of the street socially, do battle over Croatians living in Australia.

Murphy and many others on the left felt that the zealously anti-communist Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had ignored the threat of right-wing extremists, including former supporters of Croatia’s far-right wartime Ustase regime. Their fears seemed to be confirmed when a small group of Croatian Australians launched an armed incursion into Yugoslavia in 1972, crushed by Belgrade. Bombs went off outside Yugoslav travel agencies in Australia and military-style training camps were found in the bush.

Murphy and his supporters saw the contemporary Yugoslavia of Josip Broz Tito as a model of an open, non-aligned type of communism that reformists elsewhere could emulate. His feud with ASIO culminated in his controversial raid on the agency’s headquarters in 1973, accompanied by a posse of federal police. The idea that Australia’s Croatian community harboured fugitive war criminals was kept alive through the 1980s by author and broadcaster Mark Aarons; more recently, two thrillers drawing on the events of the early 1970s, written by ABC journalist Tony Jones, have helped sustain the violent reputation attached to Croatians.

Croatians and migrants from the other “captive nations” of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, had no illusions about communist regimes. They were more likely to support the Coalition, lend their services to branch-stacking efforts and help ASIO watch for Reds.

Cunliffe’s crisp response to my question set me off on a years-long tangent from my usual journalistic focus on Asia. It led me to research Balkan enmities, their diaspora echoes in Australia, and how some politicians and security agencies had favoured particular sides. It took me into the discredited NSW police culture of the 1970s and the inner workings of a high-profile Supreme Court trial.

Even then, it was an old case. In February 1979 a Yugoslav named Vico Virkez had walked into the police station in Lithgow, 150 kilometres west of Sydney, and said he was part of a Croatian conspiracy to plant bombs around Sydney that night. He was told to go home and act normally.

Later, police arrived from Sydney, arrested him and his tenant Maks Bebic, and discovered crude gelignite bombs in Virkez’s old Valiant car. With names supplied by Virkez, police also raided three homes around Sydney, in each of which they found two half-sticks of gelignite in the possession of a total of five other Croatian Australians, Joe and Ilija Kokotovic, Anton Zvirotic, Vjekoslav “Vic” Brajkovic and Mile Nekic. Taken to the old Central Investigation Branch at the back of Central Court, the five confessed to the bomb plot, as had Bebic in Lithgow.

That was the police version, anyway, and along with Virkez’s account it was enough for a jury to convict the six men of conspiracy in a terror-bombing plan, and for Justice Victor Maxwell to sentence each of them to fifteen years’ jail in early 1981. Those decisions were upheld on appeal the following year. All served their time with maximum remissions for good behaviour and were out of prison by the end of the 1980s. Their jailing didn’t improve the Croatian community’s already blackened image.

As I read the files, it quickly became clear that I was not the first person to have been tipped off by Cunliffe. Virkez, the informer, had been allowed to travel back to Yugoslavia soon after giving his evidence, and reporter Chris Masters had tracked him down to a village in the Serb-populated north of Bosnia in 1991. There, on camera, Virkez admitted he was actually a Serb, real name Vitomir Misimovic. He revealed that his evidence of the bomb plot had been false, that he had been coached in what to say in court by NSW police, and that the Croatian Six were, as far he knew, innocent.

After the interview featured on the ABC’s Four Corners, two defence lawyers from the original trial, David Buchanan and Ian McClintock, applied to the NSW attorney-general for the convictions to be reviewed. Three years after the broadcast, attorney-general John Hannaford decided against a review on the advice of two senior state government lawyers, Keith Mason and Rod Howie — advice still not public because of claimed legal privilege.

So, some thirteen years later, I set out on a much fainter trail. I discovered that Joe Kokotovic had split up with his wife Lydia while in jail, had a new family and was looking after his brother Ilija. Maks Bebic, married with two children, had started again in Geelong as a house painter. Vic Brajkovic had separated from his wife and daughter. Anton Zvirotic was somewhere in Melbourne. Mile Nekic had gone back to Croatia, but his time in Long Bay Jail had opened up his talent as an artist and his paintings had attracted considerable fame. All of them still insisted on their innocence.

The NSW Supreme Court’s registry pulled out the transcripts of the original trial, all 5000 pages in twenty boxes, and I spent weeks reading through them in between my other work for the Sydney Morning Herald.

It became clear that Justice Maxwell believed strongly in the integrity of the NSW police. All six defendants claimed to have been coerced during interrogation. The five taken to the Sydney CIB had listed bashings, kicks, partial strangulation and other physical violence, all of it denied by detective after detective.

Yet the defence found doctors and a nurse from Long Bay’s clinic who testified in a voir-dire hearing, with the jury absent, that Vic Brajkovic had arrived in jail with bruises to his face, loss of hearing in one ear consistent with having been kicked in the head, and burn marks around the neck consistent with strangulation. The defence also showed that the mugshot taken when Brajkovic was charged had been overexposed to hide the injuries.

Maxwell ruled that these revelations brought into question the voluntary nature of the written confession Brajkovic was said to have given — which he hadn’t signed but which was attested as genuine by a station inspector — and it could not therefore be brought as evidence. But he was making no reflection on police conduct, he added. And he refused to reveal to the jury during the trial that the confession, attested by police, had been ruled unreliable.

The judge also refused leave for the defence to summon police who had arrested a seventh Croatian that night in February 1979. A raiding party had brought in student Josip Stipic, and the magistrate at his committal hearing was told that they had found detonators in the drawer of his desk. After each officer had given this evidence, defence lawyer Jim McCrudden showed photographs of Stipic’s room: there was no desk, therefore no drawer, only a table. The magistrate discharged Stipic.

In his summing up, Maxwell told the jury it was a matter of whether to believe thirty-nine police officers or the six defendants, and a question of who had the motive to lie. The fact that he had suppressed two examples of police giving false evidence didn’t seem to bother him. It was, he said, “black and white.”

What also jumped out of the transcripts was the mystery of the informer Virkez. He had been tried separately by Maxwell, allowed to plead guilty on a lesser charge and held in custody until giving his evidence. Released, he was deported to Yugoslavia, where he received no penalty.

The voir-dire hearings included efforts by the defence lawyers to subpoena information about Virkez from ASIO and other federal agencies. Maxwell upheld Canberra’s objections on national security grounds without ASIO’s having to admit it had any such material. Crown prosecutor David Shillington could then argue, as he did, that there was “not a skerrick of evidence” that Virkez was some kind of Yugoslav agent or provocateur.

By the time I read the transcripts, the police involved in the case had all retired or in some cases been cashiered. The former CIB squads had been disbanded as hotbeds of corruption in 1979. Roger Rogerson, who led the raid on the Kokotovic house, had been dismissed in 1986. James Wood’s royal commission into the force had cut a swathe through the remaining ranks, and the Special Branch — which kept an eye on political and diplomatic troublemakers — had also been dissolved.

The former Special Branch officers who had joined the raids all refused to talk, as did several others. The NSW police said the Special Branch’s records were exempt from freedom of information requests. All they produced from other records was a collection of press clippings and charge sheets.

Rogerson was the only one willing to talk, so I went to see him at his home in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Padstow. Behind its neatly clipped lawn and security door, he was waiting for me, his famous charm on display: the steady blue-eyed gaze, the ready smile. His stoop from a back injury was showing, though it was much less pronounced than his crab-like walk a decade later when he was convicted of murdering a young drug dealer.

Seated in his den, he struggled to remember anything at all about the case. I reminded him about his interview with the ABC’s Neil Mercer in 1991, in which he’d admitted that the state’s CIB squads regularly fitted up known criminals. “The planting of a gun or explosives…” he told Mercer. “You know, a couple of sticks of jelly, found in their car or in their possession… It was all done in the interests of, ah, truth, justice and ah, and ah, keeping things on an even keel, and keeping the crims under control.”

“I never did it myself,” he hastened to tell me. “But there are many old stories, you might say urban myths, of famous policemen.” As for planting the gelignite on the Croatian Six, “you’d want to have guys with you whom you trusted implicitly,” and in this case there were just too many people from different squads. Even if he came out and said the Croatians were bashed and fitted up, everyone would put it down to “a jealous old bloke” getting back at the police force that dismissed him without a pension.

I put all this into a long piece for the Herald in 2012, arguing for a fresh look at the convictions on the basis of the Wood royal commission’s findings, new material emerging from scholars like John Schindler of the US Naval War College about the murderous war waged on the Croatian diaspora by Yugoslavia’s security service, the UDBa, and Virkez’s withdrawal of evidence.

David Buchanan, joined by a younger lawyer, Sebastian De Brennan, put a fresh application for a judicial review to NSW chief justice Tom Bathurst, appointed after the Coalition had taken government in New South Wales the previous year. Bathurst asked an acting justice, Graham Barr, to assess whether a review was warranted.

Barr reported that he’d found nothing in what he read to cause him any unease about the convictions. The police evidence was enough to convict, he said, whatever the doubts about the Virkez evidence, and Rogerson, after all, had explained the problems about planting evidence. The police of 1979 could not be held retrospectively to present-day standards that require the taping of interviews and ban unsigned “verbals” of the kind attributed to the Croatians.

In November 2016, though, another opening emerged. Military historians John Blaxland and Rhys Crawley published the third volume of the Official History of ASIO, covering 1975–89, the final years of the cold war. In a book vetted by the organisation and based on free access to its archives, they wrote that Virkez had been working as an informant to a suspected UDBa officer in the Yugoslavian consulate-general in Sydney, that ASIO regarded many of the alleged Croatian bombings as “false-flag” operations by the UDBa, and that ASIO had failed to note the seriousness of Yugoslav intelligence activity here. The result, they concluded, was the “wrongful conviction” of the Croatian Six.

I returned to the case, filing applications to see the ASIO records on which Blaxland and Crawley had based their conclusion. In mid 2017, I travelled to the former Yugoslavia in an effort to find records of the disbanded UDBa and former personnel who might talk. It brought the tortured Balkan history very much alive to me, and I met many young historians delving into the UDBa story. They agreed that getting Virkez to set up the Croatian Six was entirely characteristic of UDBa operations.

A senior former UDBa official in Belgrade agreed. But before switching their services to the new independent Croatia, the local UDBa had cleansed the Zagreb archives of incriminating material. The former federal UDBa archive was locked up in Belgrade by the present-day Serbian intelligence service, who did not respond to a request for access. Vico Virkez had died in 2014.

Then, in January 2018, a message arrived from the National Archives that certain files had been opened, though with redactions. I went to Canberra and found myself reading through two files on Virkez. They showed that he had been working with a UDBa handler in the Sydney consulate for six months before the arrests, speaking by telephone and meeting in Sydney, in all cases monitored by ASIO.

After the arrests, ASIO quickly concluded Virkez was the man working with the UDBa officer and circulated this information around state police forces through an intelligence channel. The reaction at NSW police headquarters was dismay. Assistant commissioner Roy Whitelaw contacted ASIO to say that if the men’s defence team became aware of this information, “it could blow a hole right through the police case.”

ASIO was initially inclined to let the NSW police reveal the information about Virkez as long as the source and wire-tapping involved were not revealed. It appears that Whitelaw opted not to pass it on, certainly not as far as crown prosecutor Shillington. With the court case set, ASIO then opted to throw a blanket around the evidence, persuading federal attorney-general Peter Durack to strenuously oppose the defence subpoenas during the trial and appeal.

Under its chief at the time, Harvey Barnett, ASIO tried to tone down its assessment of Virkez from “agent” to mere “informant.” Barnett wrote in the file that this reduced the likelihood of ASIO’s being accused of having been party to a miscarriage of justice. The Hawke government’s attorneys-general, Gareth Evans and Lionel Bowen, then signed off on moves to prevent Ian Cunliffe, by then secretary of the Australian Law Reform Commission, from raising his misgivings regarding the suppression of evidence about Virkez.

As Whitelaw correctly saw, this blew a big hole in the case against the Croatian Six — not just the information itself but the act of hiding it. As the counsel for the NSW Crown, Reg Blanch QC, admitted in 1986, during the brief and forlorn attempt by the Croatian Six to appeal to the High Court, it was “almost automatic” that a miscarriage of justice would be created by failure to convey relevant evidence to the defence.

This cover-up was detailed in my book on the affair, Reasonable Doubt: Spies, Police and the Croatian Six, which was published in 2019. Soon after, concerned lawyers — De Brennan and solicitor Helen Cook, with opinion from David Buchanan SC — began working pro bono on a new application to the NSW chief justice, who is still Tom Bathurst QC.

The application includes more recent evidence revealed by ABC Radio National producer Joey Watson in his two-part documentary on the Croatian Six, broadcast early last month on The History Listen. Watson rang all the surviving police he could trace. Some couldn’t remember anything; others told him to “fuck off”; but one talked, not for attribution, and said his raiding party had found no gelignite. (None was photo-graphed at the scene, fingerprinted or shown to the court.)

The application was served in the Supreme Court on 15 February 2021, with copies to NSW attorney-general Mark Speakman SC and NSW solicitor-general Michael Sexton SC. Their decision is expected later this month. Whether a case often compared to the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six convictions in Britain will receive an open review rests in their hands. •

• 5 April 2024 update: In August 2022, after a series of delays, the NSW Supreme Court ordered a judicial inquiry into the convictions. That inquiry is currently taking evidence in Sydney.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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“Normally, Marshall, I wouldn’t send you to a place like Australia, but right now it is critically important,” Nixon told him, as recounted in James Curran’s book Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War. Then followed a string of presidential expletives about Whitlam. “Marshall, I just can’t stand that c—t.”

By most accounts, Green is the heaviest Washington hitter ever appointed to Canberra. Originally a Japan specialist — as secretary to ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo before Pearl Harbor and then in wartime intelligence — he moved to the State Department, where he headed missions around Asia before becoming assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In that capacity, he accompanied Nixon to his historic meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972.

“He was regarded as ‘Mr Asia’ at a time when [Henry] Kissinger’s expertise on the region was regarded as relatively thin, and indeed there is some speculation that Kissinger wanted him out of Washington for that very reason,” says Curran, a professor of modern history at the University of Sydney who closely studies the US relationship. “Green had the capacity to show him up.”

For this reason Green’s appointment was widely welcomed. “Even the Labor people were saying ‘we got Marshall Green,’ as if to underline that DC was at last taking Australia seriously,” says Curran.

In reality, Canberra got Green because several members of Whitlam’s government had seriously irritated Nixon by condemning the bombing of North Vietnam, which was designed to force concessions at the Paris peace talks. Whitlam’s people might have noted that Green’s postings tended to precede attempts to overthrow the host government — successfully, in the case of general Park Chung-hee in Seoul in 1960, and as a pretext for a crackdown by General Suharto’s group in Jakarta in 1965.

Concerns that Whitlam might blow the cover of the Pine Gap satellite spy station or even close it down were part of the drama around the 1975 dismissal of his government, but Curran found that Green had already helped soften the animosity between the two leaders.

“It was Green, along with Peter Wilenski in Whitlam’s office, who fixed the embarrassing problem where Whitlam had been frozen out of getting a White House meeting with Nixon,” Curran tells me. “By the end of his posting Green was pouring a whole lot of cold water on the ‘all the way’ mentality and rhetoric, saying that Washington now agreed with Whitlam’s call for a ‘new maturity’ in the relationship. Doesn’t that seem another world!”

Green is thus often seen as an exception among the twenty-six ambassadors sent to Canberra since the American embassy opened in 1940. “My bottom line on this is that by and large the US has sent to Canberra generous campaign donors and political bagmen,” Curran says. “We usually get the runt of the American litter in this regard.”

The posting gained most attention in Washington when George H.W. Bush sent Republican fundraiser Melvin Sembler to Canberra in 1989, not long after he donated US$100,000 to the Bush election campaign. The controversy inspired a celebrated Doonesbury cartoon strip.

Several ambassadors have fitted the stereotype of a back-slapping networker, among them Harry Truman’s appointee Pete Jarman, a former member of Congress described as a “big, good-natured, Rotarian type of man,” and Lyndon Johnson’s envoy Edward Clark, a Texan lawyer and oil lobbyist who came to be known here as “Mr Ed” after the talking horse in the popular TV series.

But the appointees also include several highly experienced career diplomats, more commonly but not entirely when a Democrat was in the White House. The first two wartime ambassadors were long-time China hands, and William Sebald (1957–61), like Green, had been assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Bill Clinton used Canberra to show inclusiveness as well as diplomatic professionalism, with Edward Perkins, the first African American in the post, followed by Genta Holmes, the first woman. Obama sent John Berry, the first openly gay ambassador to a G20 nation.

In February 2018 another Marshall Green moment seemed to be looming when Donald Trump nominated the retiring US Pacific commander, admiral Harry Harris, who was noted for his strong views about standing up to China. “If we’d got Harry Harris, in my view, that would have been the first time since Green that we’d been given a real heavy-hitter,” Curran says. “The US alliance true believers were like Pavlov’s dog when they heard he was coming. They howled when he got diverted to the ROK [South Korea].”

A year later, after a record two-year vacancy, Trump sent Washington lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse, best known for choosing Sarah Palin as running mate for Republican candidate John McCain in 2008 and Mike Pence as Trump’s in 2016. In Canberra he came to be known as an “honorary” member of the parliamentary group of China hawks.

Some of Australia’s top diplomats say that the two most effective American ambassadors of the past twenty years have come from outside the Foreign Service. Tom Schieffer (2001–05), a former business partner of George W. Bush in Texas, was in Washington with John Howard on 11 September 2001 and attended many of the war conferences about Afghanistan and Iraq. Jeff Bleich (2009–13) was an old lawyer friend of Barack Obama who helped guide the annual rotation of a US marine corps battle group through Darwin, the Australian end of the “pivot” to Asia.

Did the friendship of these political allies with their president make a difference to their usefulness to Australia? “Tom Schieffer did have a close relationship with Howard forged in 9/11, and as security and intelligence relationships got closer and closer in the post-9/11 period,” says Peter Varghese, former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Office of National Assessments, now chancellor of the University of Queensland. “But I can’t think of any intervention by Tom that was decisive. They help the flow that’s already got a bit of momentum and maybe give it a bit more momentum.”

Allan Gyngell, another former head of ONA and career DFAT official, and now national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, asked around about examples of successful interventions by US envoys. “The most specific response anyone could give was that we were able to fix a problem with steel tariffs through Tom Schieffer at some point in the Bush administration,” he says.

John McCarthy, who was Australian ambassador to Washington in the 1990s, also thinks Schieffer was the closest thing to a direct line to the president, and points out that he went from Canberra to Tokyo, a post usually reserved for very senior ex-senators.

But he says any US envoy here would struggle to get attention in the White House. “Most American ambassadors in Australia would pick up the phone and talk to the Asia guy in the National Security Council on almost any issue,” McCarthy says. “Or on a trade issue to one of the deputy US trade representatives. Or even someone lower down. It’s a question of how often you make the phone call.” Even a close presidential ally couldn’t ignore the State Department, where they would work with the assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs.

“A US ambassador with a close relationship with the president is going to be very cautious about raising anything with him as US president,” adds Varghese. “In the US system it would have to be something extraordinarily important and urgent for even a friend of the president to use that relationship and burn up capital as it were.”

Significantly, the most recent crisis in the relationship, when Trump was considering including Australian steel and aluminium in his higher tariffs in 2017, was settled despite the US ambassadorship’s being vacant. Australia prevailed simply on the merits of the economic argument.

Allan Gyngell argues that a political appointee can be preferable because “Canberra never really gets a professional high-flyer, as opposed to a nice competent State Department person, anyway, because the job is just too easy — at least since Marshall Green had it.” The top people with the best connections will go to key postings like Moscow and Ankara. “But you could, of course, get duds of both types, and in the end the competence of the appointee is what matters most.”

Unlike the United States, whose ambassadors are nearly all White House–appointed, Australia normally has about half a dozen politically appointed ambassadors at any one time. Under prime minister Tony Abbott that grew to about nine, a number Varghese thinks will be exceeded in the future.

The conventional argument is that appointing a senior ex-politician to Washington means the Americans can deal with someone who has a direct line to our prime minister. And their former career and profile might also give political appointees better access to American leaders.

Varghese has his doubts. “The reality is that a career diplomat in Washington ends up having a direct line to the prime minister anyway,” he says. “It’s in the nature of the job and the nature of the prime minister’s interest. Dennis Richardson and Michael Thawley both had very regular contact with Howard when they were ambassadors.”

Are ex-politicians better at schmoozing Congress? “At one level, yes, because there’s a kind of a style to those interactions which comes very naturally to an ex-pollie and maybe not to a bureaucrat,” Varghese says. “But we’ve had professional diplomats who’ve worked the Hill very effectively, like Thawley, Richardson and Michael Cook.”

McCarthy, who had an earlier congressional liaison post in the Washington embassy, says the capital is full of former politicians, foreign ministers and even prime ministers appointed as their countries’ envoys. It is a constant battle for access, and ex-politicians are not necessarily the best at it.

“If someone is known to be a very senior politician it can help a bit,” he says. “But again the basic work is wearing out shoe leather.” Most of the time a foreign diplomat ends up seeing congressional staff rather than politicians anyway. “You have to understand how important these guys are. [Biden’s new secretary of state] Antony Blinken was a staffer, chief of staff of the House foreign affairs committee. These are the people you need to contact. They know their subject. They’re not really into the good-ole-boy stuff.”

Varghese and McCarthy both see political appointments working best in familiar, English-speaking capitals with an envoy — like Alexander Downer as high commissioner in London — who knows how to work the system back in Canberra. “I’m not one who thinks all political appointees are a waste of space,” says McCarthy.

But Varghese is generally sceptical. “Frankly, I worry deeply that our system is going to have more political appointments. It would be unrealistic to have none, but they are ultimately an act of patronage. They are dismissive of diplomacy as a profession. What they are basically saying is: anyone can do this job.”

In terms of presidential access, McCarthy gives the accolade to former ambassador Joe Hockey, who got to play golf with Donald Trump. “If a guy can get a couple of golf games with the president that’s a plus,” he says. “I certainly never could with Bill Clinton. I take my hat off to him.” Hockey had hoped to trade that closeness as a lobbyist in a Trump second term. “But now Trump’s gone, he’s stranded,” adds McCarthy.

Arthur Sinodinos, the former Liberal senator appointed in Hockey’s place, will now be working very strenuously to see Morrison isn’t stranded too. How long Biden waits to appoint an envoy to Canberra might be a gauge of his success. And a high-calibre envoy could be a reverse compliment: it might mean Biden sees Morrison as a problem. •

President Joe Biden nominated Caroline Kennedy as the next US ambassador to Australia in December 2021.

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Now comes this book by Tim Harper, a Cambridge historian who has also collaborated on books with Bayly. Underground Asia takes us down the burrows of resistance to the Asian empires of Britain, France and the Netherlands, and into the struggles over the carcass of the Chinese empire in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

In this earlier era of globalisation, revolutionaries made use of post, telegraph, steamship and loose border controls to advance their causes. As Harper writes, “Many of them — although not all of them and not all of the time — travelled as seamen, labourers, servants, entertainers, students and, most often, as exiles.” These revolutionaries — people like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, China’s Zhou Enlai and Indonesia’s Ibrahim Tan Malaka — travelled light, often under false names, “with banned literature, illicit currency or encoded messages hidden in their luggage”:

They experienced a world of connections, but also a world upside down: the underbelly of the great port cities of empire where they found they were able more freely to organise and act.

The sites of their struggles were the waterfront, the lodging house, the coffee shop, the clandestine printing press in the back alley. They made these places centres of global awareness, and their experience of a secret underworld of empire helped shape a spectrum of radical ideas — about class and national identity, the position of women, the function of art and literature, the history of the future.

Some of them hid in plain sight. “If you want to hide revolutionary connections,” as the Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin remarked, “you had better travel first class.”

The strands of revolution and resistance were diverse. Some developed out of the anarchism portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s novels. “As a doctrine, anarchism was malleable to individual needs,” writes Harper. “[It] represented freedom from the state and feudal structures and a new moral purpose.” Less a system of thought than a “utopian horizon… it was not something passively received but elaborated on locally by men and women making sense of their alienation from the old order.”

Meiji Japan was an initial beacon, especially after its victory over Russia in 1904. “The remaking of the Japanese imperial order following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 exerted a fascination on restless minds across Asia,” Harper writes. “For Indian maharajahs, Malay sultans and Thai kings, Japan was a model for monarchical revival in the face of western encroachment. For critics of royal power, Japan was also an example of successful westernisation and liberal constitutional reform.” In 1896 just thirteen Chinese students were studying in Japan; by 1905 the figure was over 8000.

As soon as Kaiser Wilhelm II learnt of Russia’s mobilisation in July 1914, imperial Germany began trying to foment revolution in opposing empires. “Rapidly, German agents took advantage of the territory of neutral powers such as Spain, Siam, the United States and its colony in the Philippines to distribute calls to Muslims to resist the British and support the Ottoman Sultan and his ally ‘Hadji Guillaume.’”

The British countered with their Arab Bureau, run out of the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, whose tentacles reached across to Asia with the help of an expanding Intelligence Bureau in India and police special branches and MI5 posts in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai’s foreign enclave. “All of this drew the British empire deeper into an unprecedented global counter-propaganda exercise as it asserted its claim to be the world’s largest Muslim power and a defender of the faith,” Harper says.

Imperial police struggled to comprehend the enemy. Some were obsessed with “those capable both of ‘visiting addresses at which Europeans rarely call’ and of haunting the exclusive cafes and luxury hotels that only whites could enter.” The conspiracies they unravelled “conjured up an ‘underside India’ of ‘every sort of half understood thing and people,’ dark with the threat of thuggee and steeped in ‘the pathos of underworlds.’ Into this bestiary of empire was now placed the bomb-parast, the ‘worshipper of bombs.’”

The contending conspiracies could baffle even the closest observers. In 1922, Britain’s new Bureau of Political Intelligence reported activity in Malaya “in various guises, whose objects are uncertain but yet give no cause for definite suspicion, and it is difficult to prevent the feeling that more is going on under the surface than we are actually aware of.”

The imperial powers responded with brutal power and increasingly efficient security services. Conspiracy trials in India sent dozens to the gallows or the harsh panopticon prison in the Andaman Islands. Unrest after the first world war saw police and soldiers fire on crowds in Tonkin and Shanghai. In Amritsar, Brigadier Reginald Dyer had his troops open fire on a peaceful gathering of Sikhs, killing at least 379 and wounding 1200. A little-known uprising by Muslims in South Malabar saw 2339 killed by British forces, the largest casualties since 1857.

In the meantime, Japan had lost its aura for the rest of Asia. It had its own bomb-throwing anarchists, dismayed by increasing “Prussianisation” and the power of the zaibatsu industrial oligarchs. And it, too, had succumbed to imperialism. Sun Yat-sen was expelled in 1907, and then used the Penang and Hong Kong underground to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. Japan joined the victorious European powers in 1919 by taking over Germany’s footholds in China.

Now the beacon was Moscow, and rebels like Nguyen Ai Quoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, began to gather in the Soviet capital. The anarchists turned Marxist. The first Chinese translation of the full Communist Manifesto, from Japanese, came out in August 1920. A few months earlier, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI, had been the first to take the communist name in Asia, followed in 1921 by the Chinese Communist Party, the latter initially orchestrated by Comintern agent Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch former trade unionist in Java. Borodin, in Canton, oversaw the creation of the Whampoa military academy, with Japanese-trained Chiang Kai-shek as commandant and Zhou Enlai as a political commissar.

But the communists were overconfident. The Indian communist M.N. Roy failed in his effort to use Tashkent as a launching pad for agents, as had Berlin’s wartime India Committee, even though his British opposition, the “Great Gamer” Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey, had his cover blown: “the band at the most fashionable café would break off and play ‘Tipperary’ when he and his companions entered.”

When Chiang Kai-shek took his new army north against the warlords, leftists including Zhou Enlai made an ill-judged seizure of territory near Wuhan and were forced to a long retreat to the coast. The communists kept their heads up in Shanghai when Chiang took control of its Chinese areas, allowing his Kuomintang and associated triad gangsters to massacre some 4000 members and some 20,000 others. In Java, the PKI launched an uprising in November 1926, with the Dutch waiting to crush it.

By the late 1920s, the revolutionaries were quelled. Mao Zedong took China’s communists on two long marches to mountains in the northwest. The Kuomintang had expelled the Comintern. The imperial powers worried more about global economic depression and rising Japanese power. In India, the British were facing a more sophisticated challenge than bomb-throwers: from minds trained in London’s Inns of Court, following either Gandhi’s non-violence path or, as “constitutionalists,” taking up London’s promise of “dominion” status as a step forward, even while realising India would not be embraced by London to the extent that Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were.

Australia’s minor mentions in this book show us as willing assistants to imperial power in Asia. Sailors from HMAS Sydney helped Singapore police quell anti-Chinese protests in 1919. When prisoners escaped to Thursday Island from the Boven Digul prison camp in Dutch New Guinea, they were returned.

Eventually, of course, it was the Japanese strike into Southeast Asia that broke the imperial hold, though it imposed new forms of slavery. The British came to agree on Indian independence two years after a Japanese surrender. The French and Dutch tried to return, one power meeting its Dien Bien Phu, the other a growing international ostracism partly stirred up by the PKI prisoners it had transferred to Australia from Boven Digul in 1943.

The main strands of Harper’s story are fairly well known to readers of Asia’s national histories. His achievement is to draw them into a continuous narrative, kept alive by colourful vignettes of characters like the West Sumatran leftist Ibrahim Tan Malaka, summarily executed by an Indonesian army patrol in 1948, the Dutch communist Sneevliet, who perished in a Nazi camp, the women who took active roles in revolution, and the dozens sent to the Gulag or liquidated by Stalin.

It could look like a litany of failure, says Harper, but it helped break the imperial “hypnotism” of Asian populations. By carefully biding their time until opponents were exhausted by war, and by enlisting Soviet support, the revolutionaries did come to power in China, Vietnam and North Korea. Underground Asia is also a reminder of how subversive communities of thought were enabled across borders by the now-primitive communications of a century ago. What are social media and mass migration concealing today?

Later this year, the heirs of Mao Zedong and the small group that held its “first congress” in a Shanghai terrace house on 23 July 1921 will celebrate the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary. In 2018, when some Beijing students tried to apply Marxism and organise factory workers, they were arrested. Long after the revolutionary years, the descendants of Mao and his colleagues now rule a system locked into global capitalism. •

The post Restless minds appeared first on Inside Story.

One example came in Crikey last week, when Canberra columnist Bernard Keane wrote that “Porter’s authorisation of the prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Collaery for revealing ASIS’s crime is intended to punish them for exposing Downer and the Howard government. Porter’s conduct in the prosecution, however, is designed to cover up Downer’s role.”

If that has been the motive, it has been an abject failure. Nearly every article about the case repeats the assumption that the bugging operation was not only authorised by Downer but also probably approved by Howard. And oblique support for that supposition came in an interview just given by the present director-general of ASIS, Paul Symon, to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and posted on ASPI’s website. The interviewer, former senior ABC journalist Graeme Dobell (an Inside Story contributor) didn’t specifically ask about the Dili operation.

Symon told Dobell that ASIS has three functions: collecting intelligence, liaising with foreign intelligence services, and what he called “disruptions or activities that are probably going to be enabled by good intelligence.” It could be “disrupting a terrorist or some type of activity where there is an action that occurs,” he said, but it required high-level authorisation. “Those activities I can’t authorise, they have to be authorised by the [foreign] minister,” who “also needs to consult other ministers, including the prime minister, who may be affected or impacted by those activities that we do.”

The Dili operation involved ASIS technicians purporting to be an Australian aid team refurbishing Timor-Leste’s cabinet room and other senior ministerial offices. There, they planted listening devices capable of transmitting audio to a nearby listening post in a floating hotel, for recording and transmission to Canberra.

The assumption has been that Timor-Leste’s tactics in the maritime boundary negotiations were the main target. Those talks were extremely heated, with Downer eventually pressuring the country’s then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, into signing a deal that split revenue from the Great Sunrise offshore gas field fifty–fifty between Australia and Timor-Leste and deferred settlement of a permanent maritime boundary.

Given the risk to Australia’s international standing and bargaining position, is it likely to have been a routine intelligence-gathering operation authorised by then ASIS chief David Irvine off his own bat? Or was it a major “disruption” operation requiring Downer’s ministerial approval and possibly a referral to the prime minister and other members of the cabinet’s national security committee? (Its members at that time were treasurer Peter Costello, defence minister Robert Hill, attorney-general Philip Ruddock and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone.)

The widespread assumption is that the buck went at least as far as Downer. As Spencer Zifcak, professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, wrote in the Conversation, for example: “The prosecutions arose from the disclosure of information related to a covert ASIS spying operation — the bugging of the cabinet offices of Timor-Leste. The operation was authorised by Alexander Downer, then foreign minister, in 2004.”

Many commentaries have drawn an invidious line from the bugging to the fact that Downer’s department head, the late Ashton Calvert, joined the board of Woodside Petroleum, heading the Greater Sunrise development consortium, soon after retiring in 2005, and that Downer himself became a consultant to Woodside after he left politics in 2007.

Disclosure of the ASIS operation occurred after the officer directing it, Witness K, protested internally in 2008 and was guided, first, to the inspector-general of intelligence and security, and thence to Bernard Collaery, a former ACT attorney-general entrusted to handle official secrets.

The last step in that chain involved one of the intelligence community’s more bizarre failures to connect dots. Collaery was also a long-time legal adviser to Timor-Leste’s founding president, Xanana Gusmão. When the Dili bugging was leaked to the media — it is unclear by whom — it became a wedge for the Timorese to reopen the maritime treaty on the grounds of Australia’s “bad faith” negotiations.

Despite an ASIO raid on Collaery’s office in 2013, and despite the seizure of Witness K’s passport to prevent him from testifying, Timor-Leste managed to drag Australia into formal conciliation proceedings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Australia eventually caved in, conceding a new deal giving Timor-Leste 70 to 80 per cent of Greater Sunrise revenues. The deal was signed in March 2018 and ratified in August last year.

While this was going on, Commonwealth prosecutors working on evidence collected about Collaery and Witness K drew up charges under intelligence secrecy laws. But George Brandis, federal attorney-general until he departed for London as Australian high commissioner in December 2017, refused to give the necessary authorisation to prosecute.

Possibly he thought that such a prosecution would be seen to confirm the bugging. Perhaps he felt it was a bad look in front of the eminent judges at The Hague to be prosecuting a lawyer and a key witness for the opposing side in an ongoing case. Or perhaps he realised a prosecution would only give more attention to a sorry example of dirty tricks.

But his successor seems to have had no such qualms. In June 2018, six months after taking over as attorney-general, Christian Porter gave the green light to the director of public prosecutions to charge Collaery and Witness K with conspiracy to communicate secrets to Timor-Leste between 2008 and 2013. More than two years later, the pre-trial proceedings are still dragging on, with an ACT Supreme Court judge agreeing to Porter’s contention that much of the trial itself will have to be held in camera to avoid damaging the national interest.

Collaery is appealing this requirement. Should he be successful, Porter will undoubtedly have to weigh whether the case is worth pursuing in public. As it is, his department’s bill for outside legal advice had exceeded $3 million by early October.

If his aim is to protect Downer’s reputation, the egg is already all over the former foreign minister’s face. If it’s to protect Downer or any official from criminal offences, the ASIS legislation seems to indemnify everything short of murder as long as it’s committed outside Australia’s jurisdiction. If it’s simply a punitive move to deter others from leaking, a better solution might be to strengthen supervision of intelligence operations to make them accord with Australian values.

In his ASPI interviews, Symon indicated that better supervision had been attempted within ASIS after Witness K raised his objections internally. Asked about the “tensions” experienced by ASIS officers being told to “go overseas and break the rules,” he responded: “It is true that we have in the last ten years or so strengthened ethics. We have an ethics counsellor inside the organisation. We have a number of avenues that if an officer at any point in time feels the sort of tension that you’re describing and wants to opt out, they can.”

If they don’t want to opt out, he went on, they might simply “want to sit down and have a conversation and want to be clear in their own mind about that relationship between ethics, morals and what they’re being asked to do with an agent. So, we’ve embedded that in the organisation and it works very well.”

If this is an admission that Witness K’s misgivings weren’t handled well, and if the system has been fixed, then why pursue exemplary punishment?

The director of public prosecutions, Sarah McNaughton, is not obliged to proceed with any case, but must weigh the prospect of conviction against other factors including the broader public interest. Last month she decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute ABC journalist Dan Oakes over his revelation of war crimes allegedly committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

It’s hard to see the public interest being served by bringing this case to trial. Having the bugging dragged up repeatedly for conjecture and perhaps further disclosures certainly isn’t in the interests of his Coalition colleagues, present and retired, or of ASIS. With the maritime boundary settled, the incident could have been allowed to recede, only half-revealed and not admitted, into history. •

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The problem was still unresolved when Scott Morrison flew into Tokyo on Tuesday, on his first foreign prime ministerial excursion since the coronavirus lockdown, to meet his Japanese counterpart, Yoshihide Suga. Nonetheless, the two went on to declare their commitment, “in principle,” to a “reciprocal access agreement” governing their armed forces training in or operating from each other’s territory.

The banal title belies the significance, highly symbolic at least, of Japan’s entering the first such agreement to allow foreign troops to operate on its soil in sixty years. That 1960 treaty with the United States allowed American forces to hold on to the scores of military bases they had occupied since Japan’s defeat in 1945.

With this “landmark” defence treaty, said Morrison, “our special strategic partnership became even stronger.” And, indeed, it represents a historic shift from the future presaged in the early postwar era, when Australia helped disarm Japan and then, in 1951, gained its own US protection — partly against a resurgent post-occupation Japan — through the ANZUS treaty.

After the culture shock when Japan replaced Western countries as Australia’s leading trade partner, a significant investor and a major source of tourists, the relationship settled into a cosy familiarity, with thousands of young people using the working holiday visa scheme started by the two countries in 1980, a first for Japan.

But the strategic setting is far from cosy now. China eclipsed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy some years back, and by some estimates has already taken the top position from the United States. It is contesting US hegemony in the Western Pacific, and has a particular historical bone to pick with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.

Canberra is also alarmed, and wants to join with Japan and other regional powers to push back against Beijing — though not to the extent of severing economic ties, since China is the top trading partner for Australia and most of these other countries. Starting with an agreement signed by John Howard’s government in 2007, Australia has moved steadily towards this week’s deal.

Alongside that push, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service has been helping Japan set up its own MI6-style external espionage service, and the then Japanese defence minister recently floated the idea of Tokyo’s being admitted to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between anglophone powers.

The basis of the new cooperation is “shared values,” and this week Suga repeated the mantra that Australia and Japan were mutually committed to democracy and the rule of law, and would “cooperate to realise a free and open Indo-Pacific.” It wasn’t necessary to state that both countries were backed by the power and values of the United States.

But something has changed to bring these members of separate US alliances together in an alliance of their own. “Historically Australian diplomacy has attached primacy to exchanging views with the United States on Asia,” John McCarthy, a former ambassador to Washington and Tokyo, wrote this week. “Since the lack of follow-through on President Obama’s pivot to Asia, and latterly the quixotic behaviour of the Trump regime, it has made equal — and arguably more — sense to talk to the Asians about the United States. Our most important interlocutor is Japan.”

Morrison and Suga would have spent much of their time swapping notes on what incoming US president Joe Biden might do in the region, and what damage Donald Trump might do on his way out. While signals from Biden’s camp showed determination to keep standing up for US interests, they also indicated a “much more structured” policy approach than Trump’s, and readiness to cooperate with China in areas like health, nuclear nonproliferation and climate.

“If this sort of thinking develops into policy, it makes sense to encourage Biden towards receptivity to indications, should they come, of a Chinese desire to wind back tensions,” McCarthy wrote. “Here, Japanese thinking is almost certainly more nuanced than our own. While rigorous on adherence to the security relationship with the United States, there is more two-way flexibility in Japan’s dealings with China.”

Instead of Canberra concentrating on naval power by promoting tighter integration among the “quadrilateral” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, McCarthy suggested that a deeper and broader engagement by America and Japan in Southeast Asia would be more effective. Getting the Americans to focus on that region might require patience, though, given that the pandemic, economic recovery and restoring North Atlantic alliances will be immediate priorities for Biden.

As well as the China relationship, Biden’s administration will have to formulate a new approach to Korea, following Trump’s theatrics with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Under current president Moon Jae-in, South Korea has declared itself uninterested in joining the Quad, especially as a junior to Japan.

The capital punishment question, meanwhile, was left hanging, as it were. Reporters were briefed that it will be tackled on a “case by case” basis — a reminder that not all values are shared in the Quad. Australia is the only member to ban capital punishment, and the other three have, if anything, stepped up their execution rates.

As the Australian National University’s eminent Northeast Asia historian Gavan McCormack points out, Suga has been at the forefront of efforts by Japan’s “Shintoists” to return their country to something like the state the United States, Australia and British India opposed before 1945 by restoring the emperor as the source of sovereignty and centre of a cult of cultural uniqueness.

“What committed Shintoists such as Abe and Suga seemed to find most offensive about the postwar Japanese state was its democratic, citizen-based, anti-militarist qualities and its admission of responsibility for war and crimes of war by the pre-war and wartime state,” writes McCormack. Referring to this week’s agreement, he adds that Suga proceeded under laws that the government’s own constitutional experts unanimously declared to be in violation of the postwar Japanese constitution’s famous Article 9, which restricts military action to self-defence. “The new ‘quasi alliance’ Tokyo–Canberra link seems to commit Australia to a view in support of Japan’s government and in opposition to its civil society on this most sensitive of issues,” says McCormack.

A similarly retrograde trend is seen in India too, where Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party is trying to impose majoritarian religious supremacism, often with sanctioned mob violence. And the last four years has even shaken the trust of many Australians in their country’s “shared values” with America.

If inclined, Morrison would have had much to reflect on during his nine-hour flight back to quarantine at the Lodge, unbroken by an abandoned stop-off in Port Moresby to meet Papua New Guinea’s James Marape, who is defending his leadership against a sudden defection of his ministers and MPs to the opposition — a reminder that domestic politics can trump diplomacy anytime. •

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The ONI chief briefs the prime minister daily, drawing on the agency’s analysis of human intelligence from ASIO and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, signals and cyber intelligence from the Australian Signals Directorate, military intelligence from the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and input from the burgeoning intelligence arms of the federal police, border protection and other federal bodies.

Upgraded from the smaller Office of National Assessments in 2018, the ONI was given an enhanced coordination role after an intelligence review by former foreign affairs department head Michael L’Estrange and former Signals Directorate chief Stephen Merchant. Where the heads of the other agencies report to their ministers (though ASIO’s director-general does traditionally have a direct line to the prime minister on urgent matters), the ONI chief’s daily contact with the PM provides an unusual degree of influence over crucial matters of state.

So should we be alarmed that the newest occupant has been described by the federal opposition as too “partisan”? This is what happened last Friday when Scott Morrison’s office named Andrew Shearer, currently cabinet secretary, as the ONI’s new director-general, replacing veteran diplomat and intelligence official Nick Warner, who is retiring at seventy. Shearer’s five-year term will begin next month.

“Labor has indicated to the prime minister that it does not have confidence in his choice to head the Office of National Intelligence,” an unnamed Labor staffer told journalists, describing Shearer as a “partisan operative.” “He is not an appropriate choice and Mr Morrison should reconsider in the national interest,” she went on. “This position requires public confidence in independent, contested and apolitical assessments of our security.” Beyond that statement, the office of Labor’s shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong says it has no further comment.

While no one doubts Shearer’s abilities, he has certainly cleaved to one side of politics — and one side of that side — in his rapid climb up the Canberra national security pyramid, much more so than his predecessors at the ONA, including Warner, Peter Varghese, Allan Gyngell and Richard Maude, each of whom also had earlier stints on a prime minister’s staff. “There is no doubt that Andrew is a more political appointment, a person who has a deeper background in politics than any of his predecessors,” says a former senior foreign policy official who asked not to be named.

An honours graduate in arts and law from Melbourne University, Shearer’s public service career accelerated after he was transferred from Immigration to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the wake of the Tampa incident in August 2001, after DFAT decided it need more expertise in migration and refugee matters. “He displayed enormous ambition as soon as he arrived,” one former colleague recalls.

Then followed a rapid shuttle around DFAT, the ONA and the office of Coalition defence minister Robert Hill. A Chevening Scholarship from the British foreign office (an anointment later given to Alexander Downer’s daughter Georgina) funded a master degree at Cambridge, and was followed by a posting as minister-counsellor to Australia’s embassy in Washington. There he gained a key mentor, ambassador Michael Thawley, a notably hardline defender of the US alliance.

On returning to Canberra, Shearer joined prime minister John Howard’s staff as an adviser. When Labor took power, he moved to the Lowy Institute, helping add conservative political balance, and then to the Coalition-held Victorian state government as a deputy secretary in charge of further international relations. Rather ironically, in view of current depictions of Daniel Andrews as a Beijing captive, Shearer was behind the opening of representative offices in China.

Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013 brought him back to Canberra as a national security adviser in the prime minister’s office, where Abbott had already appointed Thawley as secretary of his department. Shearer joined Abbott in cultivating Australia’s relationship with Japan, including trying to persuade the navy to buy its new submarines from there. He is thought to be the author of Abbott’s extraordinary speech welcoming the return to office of retro-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe, in which the naval funeral given to the Japanese submariners killed in the 1942 raid on Sydney Harbour was cited as an example of the “chivalry” underlying wartime hostility.

In opposing his appointment, Labor has blamed Shearer for inspiring some of Abbott’s more quixotic proposals — which included sending an Australian army battalion to secure the site of the downed Malaysian airliner in the Ukraine, despatching an army brigade to Syria against Islamic State, and sending the SAS to Nigeria to rescue the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram — though it’s more likely he helped talk Abbott out of these forays.

Abbott lasted two years, and Shearer was out again in Malcolm Turnbull’s clean sweep of staff. He waited things out as a senior adviser on Asia-Pacific security at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, a well-heeled think tank that exchanges personnel with the Pentagon and US foreign policy and security agencies.

From there, Shearer frequently urged the United States, Japan, Australia and India to firm up their strategic ties in the long-mooted “Quadrilateral” arrangement. His articles were published here by the Lowy Institute and the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, of which he has been a fellow for many years.

After it was Turnbull’s turn to be ousted by his colleagues, Shearer returned to Canberra, first as deputy director in the ONI, then as cabinet secretary under Scott Morrison, and now as ONI chief, just as Canberra gets to grip with the result of the US presidential election.

In many ways Shearer’s beliefs are an open book. He remains a strong supporter of tightening the US alliance. He wants to expand the trilateral strategic partnership with Japan. And he would like to draw India more closely into the “Quad,” having castigated Labor for holding back so long over India’s nuclear program and worrying about perceptions Australia was trying to “contain” China. Foreign policy experts tend to agree he is a straight-up-and-down hawkish conservative. (ONI did not respond to a request for an interview with him.)

In his writings from Washington, Shearer tried to put the best light on Donald Trump’s offhand dealings with allies and erratic closeness to strategic opponents. But he is unlikely to be fazed by Biden’s win. Before the election, some seventy former Republican-aligned US security officials, including Shearer’s Center for Strategic and International Studies colleague Michael Green, signed an open letter supporting Biden over Trump.

A Democrat administration would pick up the thread of the post-1945 security order in Asia as best it can in the face of rising Chinese power, but without Trump’s gratuitous insults. When Japan looked like breaking out of this order with the election of Yukio Hatoyama’s “Asia for the Asians” government in 2009, secretary of state Hillary Clinton left it to the Pentagon to freeze him back into line. Nor did Australia under prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard give Hatoyama any encouragement. Gillard eagerly signed the deal with Barack Obama for US marines to be “rotated” every year through Darwin.

In the back of everyone’s minds is the controversy that erupted after it was revealed that the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction — was unfounded. Critics alleged that the ONA had joined its US and British counterparts in either fabricating or “sexing up” evidence of the weapons. In his official inquiry report, Philip Flood, a former head of the ONA and DFAT, cleared Howard of having put “direct or implied pressure [on intelligence agencies] to come to a particular judgment on Iraq for policy reasons, or to bolster the case for war.” But he did conclude that ONA had got it wrong, if not as badly as the US and British agencies.

As Labor says, the ONI’s advice to the government is supposed to be strictly analytical. Under its charter act, the organisation must stand clear of policy and politics, and the director-general can’t be told by the prime minister or anyone else what to write and report.

“The person who is in charge there, to do his job, needs to be completely independent of the policy process, to have no policy preconceptions,” says the former foreign policy official. “That’s the analytical side of ONI, to ensure that always within the government there is a voice looking at the evidence objectively and telling truth to power.”

This was the intention of Justice Robert Hope, who led the royal commission on intelligence and security that recommended the formation of the ONA in 1977. “There were examples of governments which tended to see the world in terms of the prescriptions they had written,” the former official says.

Some other Canberra insiders think the noble, disinterested role has already been vitiated, and the heads of the intelligence agencies are now “players” in setting policy. “The intelligence jobs have become more central and powerful in recent years,” concedes the former official.

But Shearer’s short period as an ONI deputy director didn’t lead to complaints that he was exceeding his brief, the former official added. Nevertheless, the question, and the one that worries Labor, is whether, in his daily briefings of a prime minister not so experienced in world affairs, he can resist steering in certain directions. •

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“If the US doesn’t come to the defence of Taiwan then that will mark the end of the US alliance system in the Asia-Pacific region,” says the Australian National University’s Paul Dibb, who developed the groundbreaking “defence of Australia” doctrine as deputy secretary of the defence department in the 1980s. “Japan and South Korea would be likely to reconsider the option of acquiring their own nuclear weapons.” But if the United States defends Taiwan and Australia refuses to join in, adds Dibb, “that may well threaten the raison d’être for the ANZUS treaty.”

A Chinese victory would end American hegemony in the Western Pacific, breaking the “First Island Chain” from Japan through the Philippines to Indonesia, a series of channels wired by the United States to detect Chinese submarines heading into the Pacific. For Japan, it would bring Chinese power right up against the Okinawa Islands, a tributary state that played off Japan and China until it was annexed by a modernising Japan in the nineteenth century.

A defeat for Beijing, on the other hand, would have unpredictable consequences for China itself, shaking Xi Jinping’s leadership and the Communist Party’s mystique, and creating domestic (as well as global) economic shockwaves — so much so that Beijing could even resort to nuclear weapons to stave off the possibility, a scenario some hawkish Chinese colonels paint in supposedly unofficial writings.

Speculation about the possible scenarios has been feverish in strategic policy circles, where analysts have noted the rising urgency of Xi’s calls for “reunification” of the island, a goal he says can no longer be passed “from generation to generation.” The qualification “peaceful” has been dropped, and Xi has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for war.

In the United States, meanwhile, next Tuesday’s vote won’t necessarily end the political distraction. As Gideon Rachman wrote last week in the Financial Times, “Beijing’s window of opportunity could look even more tempting after the US has voted on November 3 — particularly if the election result is disputed and the country is plunged into a political and constitutional crisis.”

Despite the risks, it almost seems as if Donald Trump has been trying to provoke Beijing into a military gambit. An “October surprise” of this kind might have provided a pretext to claw back his voting base with a show of arms. The recent official visits to Taiwan by his health secretary and a State Department under-secretary were the highest-level — and most provocative — engagements in decades, and this month Washington announced the sale to Taiwan of US$1.8 billion in precision missiles capable of hitting targets on the mainland side of the Taiwan Strait.

So far, a week out from the US vote, Xi has not risen to that bait. Nor do reports suggest a mobilisation of People’s Liberation Army troops of the size necessary to launch an invasion across the 120 kilometre–wide Taiwan Strait. But that doesn’t preclude other more symbolic shows of force against the small islands held by Taiwan along the mainland coast or in the South China Sea, or naval and air probes to wear down Taipei’s forces.

Is defending Taiwan worth the risks? In the early 1980s — a decade after Richard Nixon met Chinese premier Mao Zedong as part of the American president’s grand play against the Soviet Union, and a few years after Washington moved its embassy from Taipei to Beijing — it didn’t seem so. A moribund dictatorship of the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, ruled the island, having regrouped there in 1949 after defeat by the communists on the mainland. Its secret police and underworld friends murdered dissidents at home and overseas.

Mao’s death in 1976 and the rise to power of the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping had begun opening up China. Hu Yaobang, Zhang Zemin and other younger leaders began experimenting with free enterprise. Neither side of the strait was politically liberal or democratic, but the economies, at least, were converging. And hadn’t Taiwan been part of China since 1683?

But then the Taiwanese president Chiang Ching-Kuo began easing the government’s tight grip. He appointed Taiwan-born, US-educated Lee Teng-hui as his vice-president, allowed the opposition Democratic Progressive Party to form in 1986, and lifted martial law, after thirty-eight years, in 1987.

When Chiang died in 1988, Lee became president and pursued political reforms, kicking the members purporting to represent mainland electorates out of the legislature and filling it with Taiwan-elected members. In 1996, when Lee became the first directly elected president in Chinese history, Beijing fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait to express its disapproval. The Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang have alternated in power since Lee retired in 2000.

Mainland China, by contrast, ended the 1980s with the crushing of hopes of political evolution in Tiananmen Square. Since then, it has pursued its version of mixed capitalism under rigid party control with a resolve that has only intensified since Xi took power at the end of 2012. Where Taiwan’s president is limited to two four-year terms, Xi has removed the Communist Party’s previously unwritten limit of two five-year terms.

Any hope of Beijing’s winning over Taiwan’s people with a “one country, two systems” formula has foundered with the clampdown on Hong Kong over the past two years, along with the frequent threats of last-resort military force if Taiwan tries to formalise its de facto independence. Resistance to this pressure helped the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen win a second term as president in January this year with a record margin of the vote. As well as electing its first female leader, Taiwan showed its social liberalisation by legalising same-sex marriage last year, a first in Asia.

Tsai presides over advanced living standards and a semiconductor and computer industry at the commanding heights of technology. Her country is also one of the largest outside investors in the People’s Republic of China, which is also its biggest trading partner.

Taiwanese authorities detected the seriousness of January’s Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan before Beijing did. Its public health measures limited its own case numbers to 571 and deaths to seven. Well-targeted support for domestic consumption is forecast to yield 1.6 per cent economic growth this year, making it one of only two major economies not to contract because of the pandemic (the other being mainland China).

Taiwan, in short, has transformed itself over the last four decades. And certainly as long as Xi Jinping is in charge in Beijing, it is only going to move further away from identifying as primarily Chinese.

America’s ambiguous attitude to Taiwan is evident in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. Strong enough to deter any Chinese military moves — not that Beijing had much power-projection capability back then — it isn’t so strong as to make Taiwan think the United States will let it get away with a move as drastic as declaring independence.

Australia’s attitude is more explicit. Having transferred its embassy to Beijing in 1973, Canberra has long hoped that economic and political reform on the mainland will win over popular opinion in Taiwan and smooth the way for reunification. While it kept open a trade office in Taipei, it has taken the view that the island belonged ultimately to China.

During a period of cross-strait tension in 2004, I asked foreign minister Alexander Downer if the ANZUS treaty would oblige Australia to support US forces in a conflict over Taiwan. The treaty applied only to an attack on one or the other treaty partner, he replied, and was only an obligation to consult. His prime minister, John Howard, side-stepped the same question by declaring the issue “hypothetical.” The curtain of ambiguity came down again.

But some American figures made it clear that Australia would be expected to step up in the event of an armed clash. Much to Howard’s alarm, former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage frequently said that Australians should be “fighting and dying” alongside Americans. When I spoke to academics close to the US Pacific Command in Hawaii after questioning Downer, they said that the Americans would expect both Japan and Australia to lend support, though in a back-up role more than at the forefront of any conflict.

It will be harder for Canberra to hide in the background if conflict erupts now. Australia’s armed forces have been equipped and configured to integrate with the Americans and operate in high-intensity conflicts. Australian officers are embedded in US command structures in the Pacific. Ships, submarines and aircraft are increasingly networked to US commanders. Our room for manoeuvre is sharply diminished.

The same is true for Japan. Its defence forces are also increasingly networked with the Americans, and its recent “reinterpretation” of its constitution allows Japanese forces to join collective security operations outside its own waters. Taiwan, which Japan took from China in the 1895 Sino-Japanese war and ruled until 1945, also has nostalgic appeal among Japanese conservatives. Japan’s new defence minister, Nobuo Kishi, is close to Taiwan, and attended the recent funeral of the former president Lee Teng-hui along with other MPs from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Like recently resigned prime minister Shinzo Abe, he is a grandson of wartime armaments minister and postwar prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.

A win by Joe Biden next week would not lessen American appreciation of Taiwan. “We’re a Pacific power, and we’ll stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values in the Asia-Pacific region,” Biden wrote last week in World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. “That includes deepening our ties with Taiwan,” he added, “a leading democracy, major economy, technology powerhouse — and a shining example of how an open society can effectively contain Covid-19.”

In Australia, only those retired from office are taking forthright positions. Tony Abbott wrote in the Australian in July that it was hard to see Australia standing aside from helping a “fellow liberal democracy.” On the other side, figures such as former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr tend to see Taiwan’s situation in the context of drawing back from Washington. In academia, the strategic “realists” accept as inevitable that China will get the Americans to back off, and don’t dwell on the likely consequences of a Taiwan conquered by the People’s Liberation Army: the purges of “traitors,” the mass “re-education” of millions of others, and the torrent of refugees to Okinawa and the Philippines.

But one analyst who doesn’t accept that inevitability is Paul Dibb. “It is in our interests to stand up for the defence of a successful democracy of twenty-four million people living on an island,” he argued recently. “Does that geography sound familiar to you? If Taiwan is not worth defending, why would anyone come to Australia’s defence?”

While in office, though, our politicians keep behind a thinning smokescreen of ambiguity, as Chinese military capability grows and America tires of foreign wars. •

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Just two weeks earlier, though, a proposal by Japan to take the strategic partnership to even greater heights, ranking that country with Australia’s longstanding anglophone allies, had met with a resounding silence in Canberra.

In an interview with Nihon Keizai Shimbun on 14 August, defence minister Taro Kono said that Japan was keen to expand its cooperation with the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact that links the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “These countries share the same values,” he told the newspaper. “Japan can get closer [to the alliance], even to the extent of it being called the ‘Six Eyes.’”

Japan has been approached about sharing its information “on various occasions,” said Kono. “If approaches are made on a constant basis, then it may be called the ‘Six Eyes.’” The country need not go through formal procedures to join officially, he added. “We will just bring our chair to their table and tell them to count us in.”

The Five Eyes pact, created in 1946 with just two full members, Britain and the United States, grew out of collaborative efforts to collect and break the coded signals of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Australia had been involved in code-breaking against Japan since the 1930s, first with the British in Hong Kong and then with the Americans and other allies in Melbourne and Brisbane. Along with Canada and New Zealand, it was elevated from associated status around 1955 after upgrading domestic security.

The achievement of the wartime Allies in breaking enemy codes was kept secret for nearly three decades after the war, partly because the same capabilities were being deployed against the Soviet Union and other powers. It was blown open by the publication in 1974 of a book called The Ultra Secret by a former staffer at Britain’s now-famous Bletchley Park. Thanks to their “Cambridge” spy ring, though, the Soviets had long known about the code-breaking.

Japan has a highly developed signals intelligence capability and for decades has been a valued contributor in exchanges with the Five Eyes group. It listened to Chinese tank commanders preparing to enter Vietnam in 1979 during Deng Xiaoping’s “punishment” for its invasion of Cambodia. It heard the chatter of Soviet fighter pilots in the shooting down of the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 in 1983. In 2018, its agencies joined those from the Five Eyes in a US war game simulating a hostile attack on the allies’ satellite systems. It closely tracks Chinese and North Korean manoeuvres.

But Kono has not so far been rushed with invitations to the alliance top table. Although Japan clearly wants to move ahead of other powers sharing information with the Five Eyes — including France, Germany, South Korea, Norway and Denmark — even the most fervid Western supporters of bringing Japan out of its post-1945 diffidence about defence and security concede it will be some time before that particular set of eyes is a regular at the table.

No one is blackballing Japan’s membership of the club, it seems, but as yet no proposer or seconder has emerged.

Asked to comment on Taro Kono’s remarks, Australia’s defence department says that Australia values its “close and enduring partnership with Japan, including our strong defence cooperation” and points to the joint statement of a Five Eyes defence ministers’ meeting on 23 June, which “recognised the role of regional partners and institutions in shaping globally and across the Indo-Pacific a stable and secure, economically resilient community, where the sovereign rights of all states are respected.” Apart from that, “consistent with longstanding practice, government does not comment on intelligence matters.”

The chair of the Australian parliament’s joint committee on intelligence and security, Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie, did not respond to a request for comment.

The warmest endorsement for closer Japanese involvement has come from the Conservative chairman of the British parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, Tom Tugendhat, after a visit from Kono in July. “We should look at partners we can trust to deepen our alliances,” he said. “Japan is an important strategic partner for many reasons and we should be looking at every opportunity to cooperate more closely.”

Washington is not pushing the pace. “The Japanese are definitely keen,” acknowledges Michael Green, a senior Asian affairs specialist in the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council who is now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. “Full ‘Five Eyes’ is not on the cards,” he adds, “but there is support for an à la carte role for Japan.”

The most obvious inhibition is cited by another US specialist on Northeast Asian strategic affairs, Brad Glosserman, now at Tama University in Tokyo and previously at the CSIS offshoot in Hawaii, Pacific Forum. Japan’s partners recognised the value of its intelligence product, he writes, but worried about the security of information they gave Tokyo. Laws to protect official secrets passed by Abe’s government in 2013 have not completely allayed those concerns.

“The Japanese leak like a sieve and the idea of the secrecy laws is all about trying to plug those leaks or make it more difficult to leak,” adds a former senior Australian official closely involved with Japan. “If they were ever going to have access to high-level information they needed to assure the US and other Five Eyes partners they weren’t going to read it on the front page of the Nikkei the next day.”

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, agrees that more work is needed. “It is widely believed that Japan does not yet have the system of security clearances and standards of information protection that would be required,” he says. “Having said that, there is much that the Five Eyes could do to collaborate with Japan — and with France, the logical seventh eye and the way in to Europe.”

In seeking deeper protection for secrets, not only in military and intelligence affairs but also now in technology, Glosserman says the Five Eyes were up against “cultural obstacles” in the form of the Japanese public’s resistance to government secrecy and “thought control.”

This is certainly true, but it might be added that Abe only added to the fears with his push for great patriotism in school education, his erosion of the independence of the national broadcaster NHK, his attacks on the Asahi Shimbun and other liberal media, and his nostalgic nationalism, all of which stirred collective memories of pre-1945 conditions.

Then there’s the view from inside the clubhouse. “The second obstacle to Japan’s membership is also cultural — but this one exists among the Five Eyes members,” says Glosserman. “The group shares deep historical and cultural ties that stem from a common Anglo-Saxon heritage; they’re all native English speaking too. Seventy years of cooperation has given them a fluency, comfort and confidence that compounds their sense of identity and separation from non-members. All this is subtle and immeasurable, but it is palpable and it matters.”

Not that the Five Eyes partners share everything. During Sukarno’s Konfrontasi of Malaysia in the early 1960s, the late Hunter Wade’s position as New Zealand’s envoy in Singapore gave him a seat in its joint intelligence committee. At a certain point, Wade once told me, the British chairman would cough, and the American representative would leave. At a second cough, the Australian and New Zealand officials would exit.

During the 1999 crisis in East Timor, Canberra’s efforts to keep certain “Australian Eyes Only,” or “Austeo,” material from Washington led to the suicide of defence intelligence liaison officer Mervyn Jenkins, who had been blamed for passing it to the Americans.

But in its original core business of signals intelligence, Five Eyes has the firm rule that each partner must share, without being asked, its entire stream of “raw” material and “end product,” or the assessments made from it. The partners are not to spy on each other’s communications (unless asked), and their human intelligence agencies — the CIA, MI6, ASIS and so on — are not to recruit each other’s nationals without permission. Those are the rules, anyway.

Australia’s intelligence and military links with Japan have tightened greatly over the past two decades. After the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, the then secretary of Australia’s foreign affairs department, Ashton Calvert, and the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, started a regular trilateral security dialogue with Japan’s foreign ministry at vice-minister level.

Then, in 2006–07, the Australian army provided protection for Japanese military engineers in Southern Iraq. Prime minister John Howard signed a joint declaration on security cooperation with Abe during the latter’s first short spell as prime minister. As well as increasing intelligence exchange and joint operations to enforce North Korea embargoes, ASIS is reported to have joined MI6 in helping Tokyo set up its own external spy agency on the British model.

“There’s hardly anything we hold back, and they deeply appreciate that,” says Warren Reed, a self-disclosed former ASIS officer and Japanese-speaker once posted in Tokyo, whose latest spy novel, An Elephant on Your Nose, has Japanese and British agents working together against a terrorist plot. “I don’t know whether it is necessary to actually put the cherry on the cake.”

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party is still deciding on a successor to Abe, but it seems unlikely Taro Kono will get the job and be in a position to push his Five Eyes membership application at a higher level. As a Georgetown University graduate fluent in English, though, the relatively liberal defence minister is well placed to allay cultural reservations on both sides. And, at fifty-seven, he has more years on his side than the two front-runners for PM, Yoshihide Suga and Shigeru Ishiba, both members of the hawkish and retro-nationalist group Nippon Kaigi. His turn may yet come.

Still, if Canberra really wants to show its faith in Japan, it could openly agree to the cherry being put on the cake. •

The post No cherry on Japan’s cake appeared first on Inside Story.

Before Australia finally shrugged off the White Australia policy in 1973, South Asians were a small minority — a little over 5000 at their peak in the 1890s, as against 29,000 or so Chinese. In scattered numbers on the margins of settlement, they incurred less of the resentment that sometimes erupted into murderous anti-Chinese riots.

Many of these South Asians were here because they had been invited: recruited by colonial authorities and businessmen from the 1860s to build and operate the networks of camel transport that serviced remote mines and grazing runs. They also had the advantage of being British subjects, if second-class ones.

In asserting this imperial identity, according to historian Kama Maclean, Indian Australians separated themselves from “Asiatics” and “Orientials” with some lasting effect. “It is curious that in Britain, many Indian communities have come to identify and be identified as ‘Asian,’” she writes. “In Australia, Indians have largely been thought of as an entirely separate category, not necessarily Asian at all.”

But they suffered calumnies and bureaucratic obstruction enough, as historian Samia Khatun shows in her case studies. And the official exclusion after Federation, when they were lumped in with “Asiatics” under the Immigration Act, was an immense and long-lasting insult to the educated classes of the entire subcontinent, even those who never thought to come here.

White nationalism in the settler colonies was the fly in the ointment London was using to try to soothe India from the mid nineteenth century on. After suppressing the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Queen Victoria had proclaimed that all subjects of the empire would be treated equally. Colonial secretaries chided premiers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa over racial exclusion, but the admonishments were generally batted off as humbug on the part of an empire that embodied a deep racial hierarchy.

Among Australians, images of the subcontinent derived from the writings of Rudyard Kipling, who visited Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart in 1891, and from romantic writings about fabulously wealthy maharajas and sultans, the mystical yearnings of Theosophists, and the opinions of resident “old India hands.” The term “Hindoo” was used synonymously with Indian, emphasising “otherness” and “heathen rituals.” Even the few senior politicians with a deeper knowledge of India, among them Alfred Deakin, upheld the White Australia policy.

But some softening of the policy did occur quite early. Persuaded by a new governor-general, Lord Northcote, who had come straight from governing Bombay, the Watson government amended the Immigration Restriction Act in 1904 to let Indian merchants, students and tourist travellers enter for up to twelve months.

Not many took advantage, and deportations of Indian traders like Mool Chand (in his case for having entered Australia under false pretences) raised periodic outcries in India. Meanwhile Deakin, as external affairs minister, was trying to get more Australians into the elite Indian Civil Service, arguing that hardy Australians were just the thing India needed to get organised and open up new fields of development. “In this, Deakin seemed to be imagining an India of mutiny novels and Boy’s Own adventures,” observes Maclean. Indian newspapers saw it as a double standard: let us in, but you stay out.

After diggers fought alongside Indian soldiers in Gallipoli, Palestine and France during the Great War, postwar Australian views moderated a little. Norman Lindsay’s South Asian character “Chunder Loo,” who featured in advertisements for Cobra Boot Polish, was transformed into an amiable, subservient comic figure present at great events. Australian prime minister Billy Hughes and his British counterpart David Lloyd George might have cursed each other in Welsh at times, but at the 1921 Imperial Conference Lloyd George pressed Hughes to agree on a compromise — keep your external barriers, but remove discrimination for those inside — acceptable to the Indians.

As much as Hughes had fought at Versailles against a racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter, he also worried about the growing power of the United States, which was drawing Canada closer, and the unrest in Ireland, Egypt and India. It all threatened to break up the empire and threaten Australia’s “lifeline” to Europe.

So imperial duty saw British-Indian residents of Australia — now about 2000 in number — given the vote and the pension. The remnant of the earlier, larger population most widely recalled are the itinerant turban-wearing pedlars who roamed inland settlements in horse-drawn carts, bringing haberdashery and household implements along with a touch of exotic colour to isolated households.

As nationalism deepened in British India, writes Maclean, settler colonies like Australia “inadvertently presented a third front against which the British in India and in London could imagine and claim to be championing Indian causes.” The Balfour Declaration of 1925, which gave equal status to all Britain’s dominions — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa and the Irish Free State — let London off the hook: it could say it had no control over their immigration policies.

Continuing discrimination through the 1930s and 1940s also had the unintended effect of encouraging India’s leaders to reject British offers of eventual dominion status. India would always be a second-class member of the empire, said Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who would be India’s first prime minister. The Bank of England had brought Australia to near bankruptcy in the Great Depression; imagine what it might have done to an Indian dominion.

With the fall of Singapore, India became even more of a lifeline for Australia, and the Indian nationalists had Churchill over a barrel. Eventually, two years after Japan’s surrender, London agreed to India’s independence. Prescient Australians had seen this coming. In September 1942, external affairs minister H.V. Evatt had said that Australia “looked forward to the people of India becoming a truly self-governing nation,” with the rider that it should still be loyal to the King. Canberra and New Delhi exchanged high commissioners during 1943–44.

The appointment of R.G. Casey as governor of Bengal in December 1943 put an Australian at the centre of one of the second world war’s most tragic episodes, the famine that gripped this frontline state during 1943–44 and killed some three million people. Maclean shows us how Australians became aware of the famine through church, business and personal correspondence that got around wartime censorship, and pressured Canberra to release its stockpiles of wheat. The government was prepared to do so if the War Cabinet in London would release the necessary ships. Only in February 1944 did large shipments begin belatedly flowing.

Somehow the glamorous couple, Casey and his wife Maie, floated above this misery. After Casey resigned as governor in June 1945 in order to return to Australia and enter politics, he wrote An Australian in India, a book that took a relatively sympathetic view of Indian nationalism, and distanced himself from the British administration. As an Australian, he claimed, he had gone to India “with no imperial past.”

Casey argued that once it was explained that the White Australia policy was based on economic, not racial, grounds it was “generally accepted” in India. But when the departing British asked Australia to take in some “Anglo-Indians” — the mixed-race and generally well-educated and prosperous children of empire — Canberra agreed only to those who were “predominantly of European blood.”

As external affairs minister for most of the 1950s, Casey shared with his prime minister, Robert Menzies, a somewhat distant relationship with Prime Minister Nehru. According to Maclean, Casey was arguably closer to Pakistan, which was drawn to the Western side as the cold war set in. He continued to play down the White Australia policy rather than try to change it, and urged the Australian press to stop using the term.

And so it went on — and so, to some extent, it continues. Our leaders are puzzled why Indians are so “hypersensitive” about race; they tend to assume all experiences of empire are the same. Multiculturalism has comfortably located racism in the past; events like the Cronulla riot of 2005 and the attacks on Indian students in 2010 are seen as aberrations.

“Many note that Australian attempts to engage with India have gone unrequited,” Maclean says. “Few have tried to appreciate why this might be the case.” Still, the Indian population in Australia grew 30 per cent over 2016–18. Whether Australia can overcome its past is still an open question, she says, but “it is clear that a redefinition of ‘Australian’ is under way.”

Samia Khatun isn’t so sure. She sees cant in how we welcome well-off and highly skilled South Asians, patting ourselves on the back for our openness, while treating undocumented arrivals by boat, many from the same region, so shamefully.

Khatun’s book focuses on the South Asians (having been born in Bangladesh, she is careful to use that term) who came to Australia during that early half-century window. This is an important, eye-opening exploration of their world and its connections, bringing into vivid centrality the “Afghan” cameleers who are auxiliary figures on the periphery of events in mainstream history.

Her “Book of Australia,” as the title translates, began as a doctoral thesis in history at the University of Sydney, and still reads like that in places. But between the thickets of Foucauldian and other theoretical analysis of the “epistemic arrogance of modernist paradigms of thought” is a fascinating detective story.

It began when she read of “an old Quran” found by local historians in the corrugated-iron mosque in Broken Hill. She travelled there, and found the book was actually a compendium of eight books of Sufi poetic legend titled Kasasol Ambia (Stories of the Prophets). How did a book of poetry in Bengali published in 1895, written to be read aloud, come to Broken Hill, when most of the cameleers were from the northwest of undivided India and Afghanistan?

Her quest to find out took her to Calcutta and its busy publishing hubs, to encounters with an irascible scholar of old texts, and to the stories of the men and women who might have picked up the book in Calcutta on their way to Australia.

We learn about characters like Khawajah Muhammad Bux, who became a wealthy Perth-based trader before retiring to Lahore in the 1920s, where he built a mosque and a girl’s school in what became known as Australia Chowk (Australia Bazaar); Bux’s son later founded the one hundred–branch Australasia Bank, now part of Pakistan’s big Allied Bank.

And Hasan Musakhan, a brilliant scholar from Karachi who won a scholarship to Bombay University and then joined a big camel operator in Australia. A follower of the Ahmadi branch of Islam (later declared heretic by the mainstream), he married Sophia Blitz from a German-Jewish family in Adelaide and became active in court cases contesting discriminatory application of the law and a writer of letters to newspapers.

Khatun recounts marriages and other encounters between South Asian men and white and Aboriginal women; brides and wives brought out from India, some in purdah, some not; and jealous shootings and elopements. This richly detailed account culminates in her journeys with descendants of the Aborigines who mixed with the Abigana (Afghans) along the camel routes and railway lines that penetrated inland to places like Marree and Oodnadatta. In this sandy country, she coaxes out the background to some of the perplexing incidents in the written record.

Khatun is not very forgiving of settler Australians and “monolingual” historians attracted to facts and progressive narratives rather than the imagined worlds and dreams she taps into. She has a wonderful ability to capture the landscapes of inland Australia and make its “marginal” people central. In showing us what has been under our noses, Australianama is as good as Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, if not better. •

The post Encountering the subcontinent appeared first on Inside Story.

That was October 2019, and the Chinese Communist Party was celebrating the fact that its republic not only had survived for seventy years but was also thriving, long after the Soviet pioneer of the Marxist-Leninist state had dissolved. Earlier that day, Xi stood on the balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square from which Mao Zedong famously declared in 1949, “The Chinese people have stood up.” Recalling those words, Xi added, “No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation from forging ahead.”

In the months since then, and especially since the coronavirus’s emergence in Wuhan, Beijing has confronted many challenges — and reacted to each of them with unabashed force. It imposed a new national security law on supposedly autonomous Hong Kong. It sent troops to a contested part of the Himalayan border, where they engaged in a deadly brawl with Indian soldiers. It dropped the word “peaceful” from its reference to reunification with Taiwan. It sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea while its navy was mounting large-scale exercises. It stopped imports of Australian barley and beef in response to implied criticism of the Wuhan outbreak. Meanwhile, Chinese fishing boats continued to swarm around the Japanese-held Senkaku islands in a “grey zone” assertion of ownership.

As American and Australian political leaders and intelligence chiefs have signalled, China is also ceaselessly breaching Western cyber networks, and its diplomats and front groups continue their covert influence operations. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has 2000 cases of suspected Chinese espionage on its hands, and Washington has closed down Beijing’s consulate in Houston, calling it “a hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”

Even among authoritarian regimes, China’s roll call of provocative activity is breathtaking. But judging what it all adds up to is far from straightforward. Is China demonstrating its strength, and reminding the West of its resolve never again to bow down? Or is it flailing around, picking fights it can’t hope to win?

“Just about everything in that set can be interpreted either as a sign of weakness or a sign of strength,” observes China historian Richard Rigby, a former consul-general in Shanghai who went on to be top China watcher at Australia’s Office of National Assessments. For Jane Golley, director of ANU’s China in the World Centre, it’s “the million-dollar question.”

American president Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have taken a bet that it’s weakness. In his extraordinary speech at the Richard Nixon memorial library in California on 23 July, Pompeo walked away from the China policy that Nixon initiated in 1971–72. America had to admit a “hard truth,” Pompeo said. “If we want to have a free twenty-first century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”

The expectation that China would become more open, free and friendly has not been borne out, he said. America had “opened its arms” to China and “marginalised our friends in Taiwan” only to have China steal intellectual property, take millions of American jobs and demand silence on its human rights abuses. “President Nixon once said he feared he had created a ‘Frankenstein’ by opening the world to the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said, “and here we are.”

After listing the Trump administration’s recent moves against China — banning semiconductor supplies to communications giant Huawei, sanctioning officials over the mass brainwashing of the Uighur minority, arresting Chinese students for espionage, declaring certain Chinese maritime claims legally invalid, closing the Houston consulate — Pompeo went on to declare a goal of regime change.

“We must also engage and empower the Chinese people — a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party,” he said, singling out in his audience two veteran exiles of crushed Chinese democracy protest, Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan. “Communists almost always lie,” Pompeo said. “The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.”

But people were waking up to this “from Brussels, to Sydney, to Hanoi,” he said. So now he was calling on “every leader of every nation to start by doing what America has done — to simply insist on reciprocity, to insist on transparency and accountability from the Chinese Communist Party.”

The ally most eagerly responding to this call has been Scott Morrison’s Australia. It had already barred Huawei from its future 5G mobile networks. Within days of the American declaration on the South China Sea, it issued a statement saying it too rejected many of China’s claims there, including the expansive “nine-dash line” delineating its claims of historical sovereignty over most of the sea. Five of the Australian navy’s most powerful ships were revealed to be engaged in exercises with US and Japanese ships off the Philippines.

Within a week of Pompeo’s speech, foreign minister Marise Payne and defence minister Linda Reynolds had flown to Washington for talks with Pompeo and US defense secretary Mark Esper. It was a pointed gesture of support, given that this routine annual consultation could have been handled by secure teleconferencing like most intergovernmental talks during the pandemic, and it meant that both ministers, their departmental heads and accompanying staff will have to quarantine for two weeks on return.

Australia duly got praise from Pompeo for “standing up” to China. But at what cost? It risked looking like support for Donald Trump less than a hundred days out from an election that polls say he will lose. And if China-blaming were going to be Trump’s election theme, to divert attention from Covid-19 disarray and unemployment, on whom would China take it out? And who could guarantee that Trump would not suddenly announce another “amazing” trade deal with Xi to settle it all?

The ANU’s Jane Golley, an expert on the Chinese economy, says we’ve just seen an example of that risk. “If you look at how the Chinese have played the barley story out here in Australia, they’ve been pretty clever,” she says. “Pushing forward a problem that they’d had with us in the past, but doing it to satisfy the demands of the US that they buy more exports from them. Then they cleverly turn around and target us, America’s number one ally, who keeps standing up and making all the noises, most obviously the Covid inquiry, that the US wants us to make. And then we turn around and say, ‘Isn’t China awful,’ and somehow the US gets away almost entirely scot-free.”

In the event, Payne and Reynolds declined to go “all the way” with Pompeo, saying Australia would reserve its decision on challenging China’s South China Sea claims by naval sail-throughs, and look to Australia’s national interests.

In China itself, Pompeo’s appeal to the Chinese people might actually increase popular support for the party leadership, according to an array of China experts. Daniel Russel, a China specialist who was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs under Barack Obama, calls it “primitive and ineffective.” In fact, a recent report from the Ash Center at Harvard University, Understanding CCP Resilience, reported that surveys of Chinese public opinion between 2003 and 2016 show citizen satisfaction with government to have steadily increased. “Chinese citizens rate the government as more capable and effective than ever before,” the authors say.

Since the post-Mao economic opening in 1978, per capita gross domestic product has grown sixtyfold, lifting 800 million people out of poverty but also intensifying inequality. Under the previous leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao the government attempted to compensate by allocating more spending to rural and inland areas and extending health insurance coverage to 95 per cent of the population. One big cause of the remaining dissatisfaction is air pollution so bad that it causes a million premature deaths each year — suggesting this is an area where China and the West could put aside differences in future re-engagement.

The anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping, who took over at the end of 2012, further improved the government’s standing. Although Xi’s campaign had elements of a political purge, the public saw it as evidence that even powerful figures no longer enjoyed impunity.

It soon became evident that the anti-corruption campaign was part of a drive by Xi to centralise authority in himself. The campaign reached into the Politburo Standing Committee itself, ensnaring Zhou Yongkang, the minister in charge of state security and public security and thus a powerful potential rival. Control of economic and social sectors was brought under various “working groups” chaired by Xi himself, rather than premier Li Keqiang. As ex-officio chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi launched a purge of officers running promotions rackets and other scams, then, having terrified everyone, started a wholesale reorganisation of the military to reduce the standing land army, boost the naval and air forces, and set up joint fighting commands instead of regional garrisons. Then, in July 2015, police arrested some 300 lawyers known for defending critics or victims of official abuses.

Xi overlaid it all with his China Dream, which envisaged a once-powerful nation restored to the respect of the world. In 2015, he revealed the Made in China 2025 blueprint for gaining leadership in cloud computing, quantum computing and a host of other new technologies.

Perhaps most revealingly, he declared in the run-up to the 2017 party congress that the distinction between government and party no longer mattered. At the congress itself, he declared that the party should be everywhere: “Government, military, society and schools, north, south, east and west — the party is the leader of all.”

And there was no doubt who was in charge of that party. The congress declined to follow the custom of nominating a new duo of heirs apparent, effectively abandoning the convention that presidents and premiers serve for two five-year terms and leaving it open for Xi to get himself a third term in 2022.

Australia’s ambassador in Beijing between 2007 and 2011, Geoff Raby, author of a forthcoming book on Australia’s place in the US–China contest, says that orderly succession had already been destroyed before Xi took power. Ahead of the 2012 congress, Bo Xilai, party secretary in Chongqing and son of a revolutionary general, tried to get himself onto the Politburo Standing Committee and thereby within leadership range with a very public campaign of “Red” patriotism. Helped by a scandal involving money and murder, Xi and his allies had Bo purged. But what was left in the party, Raby says, is “the law of the jungle,” and Xi “has had to wind up the authoritarian dial ever since.”

In his recent book, Xi Jinping: The Backlash, the Lowy Institute China specialist Richard McGregor portrays a leader who has made a heap of enemies with his purges and can’t get down from the tiger he has mounted. ANU’s Richard Rigby agrees that a secure retirement is not a prospect for Xi. “He hasn’t left himself an off-ramp.”

Although Xi is past the halfway mark of his second term, some educated Chinese are still bemused. “No one saw this guy coming,” one friend told Raby. “Who is he?”

Geoff Raby thinks that the key to Xi Jinping is his father. Xi believes that Xi Zhongxun should have run the early People’s Republic, not Mao, and that he would have done a better job of it. Despite the imprisonment and humiliation the father suffered, and the son’s disrupted education, it was time to correct history and restore the revolutionary bloodlines. “This whole generation of princelings claim that suffering as their legitimacy,” says Raby.

For all his modest personal demeanour, Xi has elevated himself to Mao-like standing. His writings, turgid and devoid of Mao’s poetic flashes, are promoted as comparable to those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. The party’s ninety-two million members are expected to read them religiously, and are quizzed regularly by a mobile phone app to make sure they are up with doctrines like the “Six Stabilities,” the “Six Securities,” the “Five Hopes” and, most basic of all, the “Two Upholds” (upholding the party’s total control, and upholding Xi’s control of the party).

At the beginning of July, just in case of any falling off in devotion, Xi signalled another anti-corruption purge, with the party’s central political and legal affairs commission, which supervises the police and the judiciary, announcing a new “education and rectification” campaign that would “thoroughly remove tumours… scraping poison off one’s bones.”

The only surprising thing is that a few intellectuals are still ready to be publicly critical. Among them is the Melbourne University–educated legal academic Xu Zhangrun, who published an essay in February attacking the regime’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Xu has been sacked from his position at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University and stripped of all entitlements, but is so far at large. Even more surprising is that many individuals have come out in his support.

But there is little reason to think that the Chinese public’s satisfaction with the government has fallen since the last Ash Center survey in 2016. Hong Kong’s protests drew little sympathy on the mainland, especially when some activists vandalised public property. And China’s leaders have been models of grown-up maturity compared with Donald Trump and his rotating cast of acolytes.

“Particularly in the US, there’s a lot of wishful thinking, that the Chinese administration is weak, that the government is weak, on the brink,” says Jane Golley. “It is one of the biggest questions of our time: how sustainable is a one-party system that becomes increasingly authoritarian and suppresses individual freedoms? But the people seem to be still signalling that they are still happy with it — or satisfied, let’s say.”

If anything, says Golley, Covid-19 has reinforced that sentiment. “I haven’t seen any survey, but what I’ve heard anecdotally is that Chinese people are looking at the US and their own handling of Covid and saying what a wonderful job their government’s done.”

As another China watcher, William Overholt, also of the Harvard Kennedy School, pointed out in Inside Story earlier this year, the Covid-19 crisis has brought out all the contradictions — as Marxists might put it — in Xi’s handling of the Chinese economy: support for market allocation of resources alongside massive subsidies to state enterprises; attempts to stimulate household consumption while pump-priming the economy with yet more infrastructure and construction; unleashing private entrepreneurship but putting party commissars onto company boards.

For a decade, China’s economists and technocrats like Premier Li, the only Politburo Standing Committee member with an economics degree, have been urging a “rebalancing” away from exports and infrastructure to private consumption. But politics, in the form of government spending designed to prop up GDP growth, has always beaten economics.

This tendency has given rise to a new wave of what Golley calls “collapsist” arguments — the view that China is heading for a massive bursting of bubbles. Certainly there are plenty to be burst, including a recent bull run on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges and a new housing boom despite an estimated sixty-five million unoccupied apartments across the country. Domestic debt is 317 per cent of GDP, and some small banks have gone bust because of bad loans, but tight currency controls and the central role of government banks may postpone the reckoning indefinitely.

In fact China, along with Vietnam, will be one of the very few economies to show positive growth this year, though that’s assuming the massive mid-year Yangtze valley flooding doesn’t damage the recovery from the first-quarter Covid-19 shutdown.

“The economy has been the leadership’s primary source of legitimacy for forty years, and even with this Covid crumbling they’re still doing better than anyone else,” says Golley. This matters to Australia, too. “We’re talking about what’s looking more and more like an economic war already, you might define it as a cold war,” and we risk siding with a country “heading for minus 10 per cent GDP growth” against an economy “likely to grow between two and three per cent this year.”

Debt is obviously a challenge for China, says Golley, “but they’ve got fiscal tools, they’ve got a little bit of scope with monetary policy, they’re the masters of intervention, so they will find ways to be the most rapidly growing economy coming out of Covid. And that’s going to give the government and the party more resilience, and more satisfaction.”

For Australia, says Golley, it’s the loss of jobs that will hurt if China keeps retaliating. “I’ve met barley farmers on Twitter and scrambling around trying to figure out what to grow next. I think the economy is going to take such a huge hit, but this current government, they don’t care. It’s all the poor and unskilled who are going to end up out of work.”

The big question about China’s strength is sustainability. Annual growth may not get back to the 7 per cent that has long been regarded as necessary to keep up employment and income levels. Xi seems worried about the prospects for the latest crop of university graduates, and is even suggesting that spells of rural work should be part of education. But even 5 or 6 per cent growth would keep China powering ahead against the United States and other rivals.

Stricter foreign investment controls in the United States, Germany and elsewhere is making it harder for Xi’s Made in China 2025 project. The Huawei issue has morphed from a concern about national security vulnerability in 5G networks to an American attempt to keep China down. And the trade war is not about trade any more, according to Columbia University historian Adam Tooze: “what dominates the discussion at present isn’t soy beans or blue-collar industrial jobs, but microchips, cloud computing, 5G and intelligence gathering by way of TikTok. What is at stake is technological leadership and national security.”

In the event of the United States “decoupling,” as some security hawks seek, China is comparatively well placed to thrive on its own. With 1.4 billion people, the long-delayed rebalancing would create a massive internal market. “They would be much better off in a globally closed economy than we are,” Golley says. “We’d be one of the worst off. The Americans could handle it better than we can with their population.”

Which raises the question of how many Chinese there are, and how many there will be. One demographer, US-based Yi Fuxian, thinks the official 1.393 billion figure may be overstated by as many as 115 million people, thanks to efforts to cover up the impact of the brutally enforced one-child policy between 1980 and 2015. Even since it was lifted, couples are not having more babies, which means that China will see Japan-style population contraction within a few years.

The fall in population might even have started, writes US demographer Lyman Stone. By 2080, and perhaps even 2050, China’s military-age manpower advantage over the United States and its allies would vanish (though future wars are unlikely to be fought that way). On the economic side, China will have to sharply increase the education, skills and creativity of its shrinking population to keep expanding. It could be caught in a classic “middle-income trap” before the presently impoverished third of the population achieves middle incomes.

A nasty corollary of that projected decline is that people of the Han majority are being encouraged to go forth and multiply but the freedom to have large families previously allowed to the ethnic minorities is being wound back. Hence the stories coming out of Xinjiang that Uighur women are being sterilised or implanted with contraceptive devices against their will. “Under president Xi Jinping, long-standing efforts to Sinicise minority groups have been ramped up to an unprecedented scale,” writes Stone.

For the moment, Xi Jinping enjoys a strong domestic position. How, then, has this not translated into greater world influence?

China’s most supportive foreign friends — the main recipients of US$5.5 trillion in loans from Beijing, or about 6 per cent of global GDP — make up a list of weak, corrupt and/or authoritarian regimes. Neither Turkey nor Pakistan criticises the oppression of the Uighurs, for instance, nor do governments in much of the rest of the Muslim world. And now many of these client states are pleading hardship about repayments.

Beijing has had to work hard to defend its early lapses in handling the coronavirus. It has had to deal with the backlash after local people discriminated against the many African traders living in southern Guangdong earlier this year, which led to Nigeria’s parliament unanimously protesting against “maltreatment and institutional racial discrimination” against Nigerians resident in China. Although China is spending billions of dollars on protective equipment and other health measures around the world, the fifty million–strong worldwide ethnic Chinese diaspora is experiencing a rise in racial vilification because of Covid-19, including in Australia.

But the United States in pandemic freefall is hardly a model for the world. How could China not be reaping the benefit globally? To the contrary, according to surveys by the respected Pew Research Center, trust in China has been falling in a swathe of advanced economies during Xi’s second term. It is unlikely to have suddenly rebounded.

“I find China’s behaviour inexplicable,” says former Australian trade representative in Beijing and Shanghai Michael Clifton, chief executive of the China Matters “second track” forum in Sydney. “The thought that they should be losing the global battle for hearts and minds in the era of Donald Trump is just beyond me.”

Beijing seems to lose its cool whenever events threaten its two core interests: territorial integrity and absolute party rule. At least four of the recent flare-ups relate to the first, and Hong Kong to both. In turn, the crackdown in Hong Kong led to deepened distrust in Taiwan, and a boost in support for president Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progress Party. Japan, its Senkaku territory and perhaps in future the Okinawan island chain subject to Chinese claims, has deepened its military engagement with the United States, Australia, Vietnam and India.

The border clash with India is still murky. International relations and territorial dispute expert M. Taylor Fravel thinks it might have started with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s decision last August to withdraw strife-torn Kashmir’s statehood and run its high-altitude Tibetan-populated region, Ladakh, as a “union territory” directly from New Delhi. Modi’s home minister, Amit Shah, followed this up by strongly reasserting India’s territorial claims and publishing a new map.

When China moved troops to the disputed area, Aksai Chin, India did likewise. Though China had created the conditions for the clash that followed, it had not been intent on one. “I don’t think the clash is something that China sought,” Fravel told the Print newspaper. “Because if one looks at Chinese diplomacy today, they are very much clearly trying to put the genie back in the bottle, restore China–India relations to a place they were before the clash. China hasn’t released its own casualty numbers, and so forth.”

It hasn’t worked so far. Modi has banned TikTok, among more than one hundred popular Chinese mobile phone apps, and welcomed a new factory in Chennai that would take manufacturing work on Apple’s iPhone 11 away from China. He is also moving to strengthen the “Quad” military alignment with the United States, Japan and Australia.

And while Trump has put the United States in a disgraceful position, China has clearly been taken aback by his wielding of non-military power: in getting Canada to detain the Huawei executive and heiress Meng Wanzhou for possible extradition; in placing sanctions on Xinjiang officials that could see Chinese banks blocked from international clearing systems if they don’t join in; in suddenly embargoing the semiconductors Huawei needs.

While Beijing officials have been cleared to make tough responses to challenges from countries like Britain and Australia, they take a cautious and regretful line with Washington. The closure of the US consulate general in Chengdu, in response to Houston, was a measured tit for tat, not an upping of the ante. Demonstrations by “patriotic citizens” were allowed as American diplomats moved out, but Chengdu residents were also allowed to post friendly social media farewells to the American consul and his wife and even put up clips of wartime newsreels from when the US military operated out of nearby Chongqing supporting China against Japan.

Nevertheless, it looks like being a fraught hundred days until the US elections are over. Trump is painting his contender Joe Biden as a sellout to the Chinese; Chinese propaganda officials are saying they want Trump to win because he will bring down America and destroy its alliances. It all means that under Trump or Biden, engaged or decoupling, Washington will have permanently firmed up against China.

As for Xi Jinping’s position, it will continue to be enigmatic. “Any shock will come in elite politics,” said Geoff Raby. “It will be played out in a way we can’t see, that we won’t know about until it’s happened.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Now a new middle way seems to be in contention: minilateralism. The word has been uttered recently by the two federal ministers most concerned with world power — foreign minister Marise Payne and defence minister Linda Reynolds. They used it to describe the welter of video calls they and prime minister Scott Morrison have made to their foreign counterparts since the Covid-19 pandemic shut down physical meetings nearly five months ago.

The debate started when Morrison gave a speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney last October. It was his first major foreign policy statement since being returned to office in his own right, and he prefaced it by saying he’d never been much interested in international affairs.

That didn’t stop him from taking a big stab. The nub of the speech was a rejection of what he called “negative globalism” and a call for Australia to resist being dictated to by an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” Canberra, he announced, would undertake an “audit” of its membership of international bodies.

As Jonathan Pearlman, editor of Australian Foreign Affairs, summed it up:

Morrison’s pre-pandemic instinct was to view the faults with international bodies such as the United Nations and its agencies — they can be bloated, or lack transparency, or subject to undue influence — as evidence that Australia should be ready to abandon them. This was never a good option, but it seemed viable when the alternative to consensus-based decision-making was to firmly back US leadership.

Morrison’s stance created much dismay among foreign policy experts. They quickly pointed out that multilateral arrangements tend to protect small and middle powers against coercion by big and powerful states, especially when the alternative — hitched to a United States under an embarrassing leader — seemed much less enticing.

Come the pandemic, the international agencies were being given the tick by Canberra’s auditors. “Covid-19 has shown that our international order is as important as ever,” Marise Payne told the ANU’s National Security College. “There is need for reform in several areas, but the pandemic has brought into stark relief the major role of international institutions in addressing and coordinating a global response to a global problem.”

Former Coalition frontbencher Mitch Fifield amplified the point on 1 July in his capacity as ambassador to the United Nations. The United Nations was far from perfect, he told the Asia Society Australasia, but it was an indispensable partner both during the Covid-19 response and, beyond that, through its development, humanitarian, and peace and security work. The choice between being “a muscular and realistic bilateralist or a starry-eyed multilateralist” was a false one; governments needed to walk both paths to achieve their goals.

Despite concerns about the World Health Organization, he went on, the pandemic had also “brought into relief, the benefits to Australia’s interests through the international rules and norms set by these institutions, and the consequences of stepping away and leaving others to shape the international system in ways that may contradict our interests.” The government’s recent audit of Australia’s engagement in multilateral institutions had concluded, he said, that “the rules and norms developed through the UN and the services it delivers are vital to Australia’s interests, values, security and prosperity.”

So where does “minilateralism” fit into this picture? The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade didn’t immediately respond to this question, but Allan Gyngell, now heading the Australian Institute of International Affairs, says the term had been around for some years.

“It gained traction as the problems in the larger multilateral institutions, with more members and divergent agendas, were making it harder to reach outcomes,” he tells me. “The idea was that you could work with smaller like-minded groups to make progress. You’ll remember ‘coalitions of the willing.’” Multilateralism in smaller groups, in other words?

“I’ve always found it a rather ugly neologism myself,” says Gyngell. “It has been most closely associated with institutions like the Quads” — the putative grouping of the United States, Japan, India and Australia, designed to balance China — “but it would equally apply, I guess, to groups like ASEAN plus 3.”

The list of video calls made by government figures does indeed suggest that minilateralism involves the like-minded and the friendly.

Since March, as Australian Financial Review political correspondent Andrew Tillett detailed recently, Scott Morrison has spoken, mostly one-on-one, to the leaders of thirty-nine countries: seven times with Jacinda Ardern, three times each with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and twice each with Angela Merkel, Joko Widodo, Justin Trudeau, Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape.

Morrison has also spoken to Shinzo Abe twice. During a “virtual summit” on 9 July the two of them reached a status-of-forces agreement on military exchanges and cooperation in space. Morrison also held a “virtual summit” with India’s Narendra Modi, following on from a phone call between Canberra and New Delhi. Calls have also been made to the leaders of South Korea, Israel, France and Vietnam, as well as those of smaller neighbours: the Cook Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Timor-Leste.

Canberra has few arguments with any of these countries, and much familiarity with most. If he raised anything contentious, such as the question of territorial annexation with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, it has not been disclosed.

Moving into less familiar territory, Morrison has also spoken to Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, and Belgium’s Sophie Wilmès, both of whom lead countries badly hit by the virus, and to the heads of the European Union and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.

But a virtual summit of the G20 on 30 April was the only close on-screen encounter with wielders of rival power like China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and then only as part of a mosaic of images on a very large screen. The summit was all about cooperation against the virus.

On the multilateralism front, Australia has many disagreements with the Trump administration: its withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade and investment pact, its hobbling of the World Trade Organization by refusing to endorse new dispute resolution judges, its use of tariffs to force trade concessions, its announcement of withdrawal from the World Health Organization, and its threats to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court if they investigated US personnel.

None of this seems to have surfaced in Morrison’s latest talk with Trump, just three days ago, which was portrayed as a sunny thirty minutes in which Covid-19 setbacks were played down, economic reopening foreshadowed, and compliments paid to Australia’s new defence plans. But they did touch on “approaches to multilateral organisations” and “commitment to open markets,” according to an official statement, which suggests Morrison nudged into areas sensitive for the president.

On the same day, Malcolm Turnbull told a Lowy Institute audience that Morrison never had strong feelings about negative globalism anyway. “I think early in his time as PM he was unduly influenced by people on the right of politics, both in his own circle and in the media, to whom this sort of UN-bashing, anti-globalist thing is bread and butter,” Turnbull said. “It’s the same sort of thing that Trump goes on with.”

Still, the adviser that Turnbull suspects was behind the speech, China hawk Andrew Shearer, has moved even closer to the centre of Morrison’s circle. Formerly deputy director of the Office of National Intelligence, he is now cabinet secretary.

Australia’s multilateral diplomacy, post the DFAT audit, is geared up to battle for improved performance by UN agencies and getting more of their leadership positions filled by Australians or people from democratic nations. No doubt Morrison is also being advised to help coax Trump away from more damaging actions in the global arena, pending the November presidential elections.

But minilateralism continues. Canberra is encouraging the Five Eyes group of Anglophone nations to broaden its ambit from signals intelligence to cybercrime, transnational crime and infrastructure security. It desperately wants to be included in war games with Japan, India and the United States. And it hopes to guide the newly named South Pacific vuvale (family).

To Cavan Hogue, former ambassador to Moscow and other important capitals, it looks like Morrison is trying to get close to what are perceived as reliable allies. “He’s not Zooming to anyone in China,” he says. “Is he really trying to find an alternative to the USA? Or does he still cling to the security blanket of benevolent Uncle Sam in the belief that Trump will go away after the election and the nightmare will be over?”

Despite the talk of a post-pandemic world, “there has been no public suggestion that the Alliance is to be abandoned,” says Hogue. “On the contrary, its importance has been reinforced.” But his could be harder than Morrison might imagine. “I see that [PNG prime minister] Marape was one of those who voted to support China over Hong Kong in the Human Rights Commission,” he says. “A warning?”

Under Morrison, Canberra still seems to be zooming in, rather than zooming out. •

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