Defence's War Of Words

by Nicholas Stuart - Canberra Times

A secret cabinet document from August last year presents some of the remarks surrounding last week's Defence Update in a radical new light. It also allows us to interpret the furore that has accompanied Dr Brendan Nelson's comments about Iraqi oil very differently to the way they've been presented in the media.

Both sides of politics regularly assure us that defence is far too important an issue to play politics with. Nevertheless, particularly in an election year, it seems as if the temptation to score a few political points is just too great.

The Defence Update itself is an unexceptionable document, its political nature is readily apparent from the glossy photographs that accompany the text. After a full-page colour photograph of Nelson receiving a briefing while visiting operations in the Pacific, we see a photograph of a navy helicopter pilot cradling a child who's clutching a plastic fighter jet possibly an example of inter-service cooperation. Important sentences are repeated in bold type, just to make sure that the reader gets the message.

That's how we know that "our forces are more active (overseas) than at any time since the Vietnam War"; and that "increasingly they will be called on to fight irregular opponents ... but must also remain alert to more conventional military dangers". It's so glossy and neat that it almost reads like a political document.

It's an update that says everything and nothing, carefully restating the obvious themes relating to our defence in an appropriate way. There is nothing new, and certainly nothing radical in the careful assessments that catalogue our strategic situation. But this has not stopped politicians from both sides attempting to score points with the publication of the document.

The Government began the rhetorical war with the issuing of the update at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last week. The Prime Minister insisted that he was "hammering the last nail into the coffin of the Defence of Australia doctrine". The strategic architect responsible for originally articulating this idea, Professor Paul Dibb, was sitting in the audience as Howard made his assertion.

I quickly and rather nervously glanced over to where the professor was sitting. I was unsure whether I would see him being bundled up and dragged away, possibly even with a stake through his heart. So I was most disconcerted to see a gentle smile playing around his mouth. I approached him in the break after the Prime Minister left, wondering if perhaps he hadn't heard what was being said. He had, of course, but the difference between our two reactions represented the difference between a journalist getting carried away with words and an academic looking at the meaning sitting beneath the rhetoric.

"Of course we need to engage with the world," Dibb says, "because that's exactly what the defence of Australia is about". Just to emphasise the point, the professor begins to tick off the overseas engagements our forces were sent to in the years before Howard came to power. "Namibia, Cambodia, Mauritania, Rwanda, we had people in the Sinai and Lebanon," his words keep coming, a roll-call of operations all a long way from the boundaries of the continent of Australia.

But of course, particularly in an election year, this does nothing to sharpen the difference between the Government and Opposition. That's why, regardless of what our soldiers are actually doing, we've seen both sides of politics attempt to position themselves in the public consciousness as best to be trusted with the security of Australia.

In the past, this has been the Government's strong suit.

But Rudd has refused to abandon the terrain to the Government, and Labor also spent last week ratcheting up the phoney war. The Opposition Leader presented his speech to the Lowy Institute, timing its delivery quite deliberately to challenge the Government directly and prevent it stealing ahead of its rival.

Rudd's focus was closer to home; the implication being that while the Government has been focused on the Middle East, our own neighbourhood in the Pacific has been falling apart. It was possible to detect the thinking of Bob Sercombe behind much of the tight policy reasoning laid out in the Opposition document. It's very unfortunate that he's been toppled for preselection, because Australia requires people with his level of understanding of the region if we're going to engage effectively with our neighbourhood.

Nevertheless, Rudd's ambitious suggestion a sort of Marshall Plan for the South Pacific does offer a way of assisting the recovery of the island economies around us. The problem is that funding commitments remain vague and that in its first term a Labor government would simply restrain itself to an "audit" of facilities in the "arc of chaos" to our north. One begins to suspect that this plan might also be simply a rhetorical device intended to score political points.

The document that cabinet saw last August makes it clear that both parties are committed to the same idea defending Australia. No matter what the rhetoric is in the Government's white paper, this will remain the foundation stone of our defence. Labor is happy to play with the idea that it could somehow engage in other ways of enhancing our security, but as yet hasn't put any details on the table to allow us to properly evaluate these ideas. So far, both sides have just played with words.

This became obvious when Nelson was pilloried for simply pointing out that maintaining our resource security is important. But in the context of Iraq, this means only one thing oil. From there it's just a quick hop, skip and jump from there to the suggestion that we originally invaded Iraq for the oil, which is a ridiculous idea.

We invaded Iraq because George W. Bush had already decided he was going to, and it's very difficult to incorporate the actions of people like this into any well-thought out strategic plan.


Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.