The last century saw technological change of an unprecedented scale and pace. With massive developments in communications mobility, on-demand content, processing power, and realistic technology like 3-D and holography, the pace of change is not expected to slow.

In last week's Wednesday Lowy Lunch, Telstra's Chief Technology Officer Professor Hugh Bradlow reviewed the impact of information and communications innovations on human behaviour and global economic prospects — and looked at the implications for Australia's competitive future.

You can listen to Professor Bradlow's speech here; he reviews his major themes in our five-minute interview below:

Photo by Flickr user JonJon2k8, used under a Creative Commons license.

In response to my post on the powers of the President of Timor-Leste, an Interpreter reader has pointed out that in addition to the powers referred to in that post (for which the President has sole competence or requires only consultation with government before exercise), the President has further, and possibly quite potent powers:

• to declare war, peace and states of siege or emergency, under authorisation of National Parliament and after consultation with the Council of State and the Supreme Council of Defence and Security (sections 85 and 87(d))
• to conduct, in consulation with the Government, any negotiation process towards the completion of international agreements in the field of defence and security

Says our reader:

The implication of this, which seems to have been overlooked in media commentary, is that it would be perfectly reasonable for a foreign government to contact President Ramos-Horta to initiate negotiations on a security or defence agreement.  It would then be incumbent on the President to pursue the negotiations in consultation with Prime Minister Gusmao and his government. 
 
I'm not suggesting this security/defence provision is necessarily relevant in the context of asylum-seekers.  As a matter of process, though, it's interesting that Prime Minister Gusmao seems to have asked President Ramos-Horta to continue the discussions with Australia on a regional processing centre for now.  Section 87(d) just seemed to me a slightly stronger example of how misplaced the representation of Ramos-Horta as a ceremonial president is, and how characteristically tongue-in-cheek Ramos-Horta was being at the National Press Club in his comments about cutting wedding cakes and ribbons.

Photo by Flickr user presidencymaldives, used under a Creative Commons license.

Now that the commotion over the so-called 'Timor Solution' has subsided somewhat, time for a small (some might say petty) clarification.*

In the uproar over the new PM's eleventh hour approach to José Ramos-Horta to request his country's accommodation of a regional refugee processing centre, most commentators dismissed the approach as a diplomatic 'gaffe', owing to Ramos-Horta's lack of powers as President. Generally, these powers were pronounced by all and sundry as 'largely ceremonial' (for example, The Daily Telegraph, Brisbane Times, and Sydney Morning Herald). One academic went so far as to tell ABC’S Lateline that:

He has no actual authority to make decisions. His role is entirely ceremonial. And so it's like talking to Quentin Bryce, our Governor General, she's a ceremonial head and Horta is in a similar position.

A look at the Timor-Leste constitution demonstrates that this is all pretty sloppy stuff. Unlike Australia's constitutional system, Timor-Leste chose for itself a semi-presidential system 'where there is a balance between the powers of the organs of sovereignty'. The position of President is somewhat more powerful, then, than that of our Governor-General:

• the President of Timor-Leste is directly elected by the East Timorese (section 76). Ramos-Horta obtained 69 per cent of the vote against Francisco Guterres in 2007
• the President has a right to veto any statutes (section 85(3))
• s/he has the right to grant pardons and commute sentences
• s/he chairs the Council of State and the Supreme Council of Defence and Security, appoints the President of the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor-General, five members of the Council of State and two for the Supreme Council of Defence and Security.

Both Ramos-Horta and Gusmao (the two Presidents of Timor-Leste since its independence) have (modestly?) downplayed their roles at times. read more

After being reminded of PJ Keating's 'arse end of the world' comment while watching 'Hawke' on TV on Sunday night, I thought I'd find out how interested the rest of the world was in its arse's latest election.

Warm to middling, as it turns out. Media searches show that while the major news agencies and online services covered the story (1012 words from Xinhua News Agency were widely used on its online news service, for example here, and here), there was less in the printed press.

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times each ran a short paragraph. The UK's Mail was quick to claim the PM as a Welsh woman and Brit in its online article, and The Guardian ran a very brief piece in print and more online. The Scots ran a print piece on page 32 of the Sunday Herald. The Chicago Tribune ran a few lines in its world section and picked up the Welsh angle in its online version. India's Statesman ran 500 words in print and and more online.  The Wall Street Journal only ran it online, as did the UK Times (subscription only). The News of the World had a one-liner in its world news mash-up on page 29 under the marvellous heading 'Puff baddie's store stick-up on oxygen'.

On this highly scientific analysis, Australia's rightful place in the world's anatomy remains anyone's guess.

Photo by Flickr user tochis, used under a Creative Commons licence.

• Walter Russell Mead agrees with Time's Joel Klein and Fidel Castro that war between the US and Iran is increasingly likely (but not ncessarily for the same reasons)

• David Frum, influential US conservative commentator, former George W. Bush speechwriter and now blogger and sometime guest editor of Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, has called for a new 'mission' for American Republicanism in which he advocates a 'peaceful American-led world order' — this led to some agitated conservative responses and a subsequent explanation

• A New York Times piece compares 1920s photographs of Himalayan glaciers with shots taken this decade — illustrating a point Milton Osborne made back in February about the IPCC Himalayan claims debacle and the stark realities of glacier retreat

As Sam pointed out earlier today, Julia Gillard's 'East Timor Solution' to the asylum-seeker issue is far from a done deal.

President Ramos-Horta of East Timor issued this statement this afternoon. It's critical stuff, diplomatically couched:

Dili, 06 Jul (PPR): President José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, spoke yesterday on the phone with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard discussed with President José Ramos-Horta the issue of illegal asylum seekers and people smuggling.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard expressed her desire to see a regional arrangement where by individuals would be processed, treated with respect and dignity.

At a function a week or so ago which launched a new Soft Power and Public Diplomacy project at Macquarie University, I discovered that the international promotion and marketing function of Australia Education International was to be transferred, with little  fanfare, to Austrade.

Why is this significant? Or even interesting?

AEI had a busy year last year. Indian students crisis. Private international school scandals and closures. AEI's handling of these crises may not have been optimal. In a blog post last year, I was somewhat critical of its efforts at public diplomacy in a year which saw Australia's lucrative education industry lurch from one crisis to the next.

Yes, education is Australia's third largest export, bringing over $18 billion into the country last year, second only to our coal and iron ore exports.  And yes, AEI could have handled things better. Yet under AEI's marketing stewardship, Australia's international education enrolments have increased on average 11 per cent each year since 2002. According to experts in the University sector, including the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Development and External Relations, at Macquarie University, AEI has developed good relationships with education partners here and overseas. The shift of responsibility implies that AEI is being punished in some way for the collapse in Australia's reputation for international education.

Yet it would be overly simplistic to suggest that this collapse was only of AEI's making.  read more

Interesting discussions last week at the Senate Estimates hearings on the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade portfolio. One of the key interrogators, Senator Trood, has confirmed our view that our diplomatic services are perilously close to critical condition.

In an ABC interview with Monica Attard last month, the new Secretary of DFAT, Dennis Richardson, called the under-resourcing of his department 'the great hangover', a reference to 'the contraction in the size of the department between the early 90s and 2008'. While the Australian publlic service grew by around 25-30 per cent from 1996-2008, he told Ms Attard, DFAT shrank by 11 per cent. Richardson used the evocative 'hangover' metaphor again in Estimates last week.

A figure Mr Richardson could have referred to, but didn't, was the shrinkage in Australia's overseas representation, which plummeted from 870 Australia-based staff overseas in 1989 to 537 in 2009, according to DFAT annual reports. That's a very ill-looking 38 per cent dismemberment. Right at a time of rapid globalisation. As Ms Attard queried, 'can you continue to pursue the Prime Minister's objectives like the Asia Pacific community by 2020 with that sort of money?'

More importantly, can DFAT perform even its most basic functions with that sort of money? 

John Hannoush writes in response to my post:

Is it reasonable to assume that number of overseas missions is a reliable indicator of diplomatic efficacy? Maybe Iceland or Finland are being a bit wasteful. A targeted approach might work better: for example, we could use as an indicator numbers of staff working in countries of high priority. If we were significantly cutting staff numbers at the Washington mission, for example, that would presumably be of concern.  If we decided to get rid of the mission to the Holy See and accredit from Brussels, that might not be of such moment.

Good point. At the time of the Blue Ribbon Panel report, around 40% of Australia's posts overseas were small posts, a number which has grown sharply since 2000. With the best of intentions, staff at small posts often struggle to meet the most basic commitments, and if accredited to more than one nation, there's little scope for much beyond the minimum required to maintain formal diplomatic relations.

Our argument, though, is that we need more diplomats overseas, and not simply a shuffle between posts. In the face of budget pressures, the simplest solution is often to cut overseas posts because they are costly to maintain.

There's no joy in the budget for Australia's diplomacy. The deficit we reported last year and reiterated this year continues unabated.

There's been a modest increase, as Hamish McDonald termed it this morning. The Departmental appropriation is up to $1.328 million, $83 million more than last year (or a 6.7% increase). The Department's administered expenses (programs which it oversees but lacks ultimate control, such as the funding of the Australia Network and the running of the Shanghai Expo) fell by around $100 million.

But the real picture is much more complex. Australia still has the fifth lowest number of embassies overseas of all OECD nations (even Finland and Iceland have more). The number of our diplomats overseas was almost halved between 1989 and 2009. There are no signs of the 75 new staff overseas or 20 new missions over ten years which we recommended last year to raise Australia's diplomatic representation to a more competitive level.

The 2008-9 operating budget (excluding those administered expenses) was $1.1 billion, but this was stripped to $893 milion when programs and resources were pared back during the year. The 2009-10 budget was $1.2 billion, and that was about what was spent (but only after cuts of over $100 million over the next four years were announced back in November, taking back half of the boost heralded in the budget). On this sort of track record, this year's meagre injections look decidedly shaky.

Barack Obama has inadvertently contributed to our lengthy debate on the morality of drone warfare. The joke went down OK at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last week, but not so well after the event: here, here, here ... 

Qatar Holdings, the investment arm of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund the Qatar Investment Authority, has bought Harrods from the Al-Fayeds.

This cements Qatar's position as one of the more innovative diplomatic operators around these days. As Carla Liuzzo pointed out earlier this year, Qatar is well known for launching and backing the Al Jazeera network - which now has one of the largest operating budgets of any of the government-funded broadcasters. It is less known, so far, for its other soft-power ventures - in particular, the projects of the Qatar Foundation, which reputedly has an endowment of $4 billion.

• US Defense Secretary Robert M Gates addressed the Navy League in Maryland this week on the changing demands on the US navy, new challenges from an altered strategic landscape, and the task of meeting hardware needs in a time of spiralling costs and a tightened fiscal environment ...   
• Here's an nice irony: leading Republican Eric Cantor has condemned Obama's attempts at engagement with Iran and Russia, urging that 'America ... restore its credibility by pursuing peace through strength'. Only a few weeks ago, around fifty retired three and four star US generals and military officials advocated increased spending on diplomacy and development, arguing that 'the United States must combine its strong military with robust, effective civilian tools of international development and diplomacy to secure its national interests in an era when many of the challenges of the 21st century recognize no borders'.
• Obama on McCain: 'Maybe I shouldn't be president', he said in his familiar wry tone, only with more amazement than usual. 'But he definitely shouldn't be'.

This month, Austrade is due to unveil the new Brand Australia, the culmination of an eight-month process of tendering for and creating a new communications campaign for the nation. The advertising agency selected to create the $4 million a year, four year project is M&C Saatchi, creator of the 'so where the bloody hell are you?' campaign. And didn’t that go well …

According to the Minister for Trade, Simon Crean, the idea is to build a 'contemporary national brand — one which captures the essence of Australia'. He elaborates on this 'essence':

• 'a great place to visit … , live, work, and  invest'
• 'a trusted trading partner'
• 'a great place to pursue an education'
• 'a nation producing quality products and services'
• 'an innovative nation'
• 'a quality supplier to the world of key products such as clean energy and clean food' 
• '… we want a brand that captures the vibrancy, energy and creative talents of Australia — a country that has won no less than 10 Nobel prizes'

Wow. That’s a long wish list for one campaign. Good luck, M&C Saatchi. read more

I didn't realise I had a mind to change about Laura Bush until I read Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife. While she was apparently one of the most popular first ladies in history, I gave her negligible thought — a perfectly-coiffed president's companion doing the usual first-wifely things for her powerful husband – that was about as far as I got. My love of a good novel, however, unravelled my studious indifference.

American Wife is a story about the life of Alice Blackwell, a first lady around the time of George W Bush's presidency. It's a fictionalised account, but constructed using the edifices of that presidency (the wars, the political dynasty) and some central events in Laura Bush's real life. 

So there are some pivotal elements to Alice's story which were transposed from Mrs Bush's own experiences: a car crash in her teens that killed a young friend, her career before meeting her husband (a librarian and teacher with a love of books and passion for education and literacy), and her work as first lady (campaigning for literacy and childhood development programs, for global health issues and breast cancer awareness).

But because it's fiction, we get some tantalising glimpses of what the thoughts, motivations and feelings of someone like Mrs Bush might be, which could be hinted at, but never credibly asserted, in a biography. And there are several, such as Ann Gerhart's 2004 biography The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush. 'People who knew Laura socially or worked with her on projects,' Gerhart wrote, 'came to assume she was far more liberal than her husband, although there was never any hard evidence for this.' 

American Wife got me thinking about the strictures on the life of a political spouse, how differing political views might play out in a marriage, and casts this notorious episode in America's political history in a slightly different light. All this in a work of fiction. Worth a read over the holidays, if you dare...

Photo by Flickr user Westbank Library District, used under a Creative Commons license.

Another hard luck story about the general lack of consular support Australians receive from their government when travelling and living overseas — this time from an Australian couple running a resort in Samoa, who are getting agitated that the Australian government has not done enough to assist them in their recovery from the Samoan tsunami two months ago.

The couple, originally from Queensland, say that they have had no assistance yet from the Rudd Government, but that they 'expect that to change because [they’re] starting to get unhappy and ruffle some feathers'.

The overblown and sometimes hysterical expectations of Australians who find themselves in trouble overseas, fanned by hyperbolic media reporting, are something we’ve written about on several occasions. In March this year, we argued for more resources for the overstretched consular service overseas in our Blue Ribbon Panel Report on the state of Australia’s diplomatic infrastructure, Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit.

Back in late 2007, Hugh White’s Lowy policy brief, Looking After Australians Overseas, foreshadowed a serious mess if our government’s ability to deliver good foreign policy continues to be hobbled by its shrinking resources and mounting consular workload. And here’s another along the same lines.

Strangely, Australians who travel or live overseas expect far more assistance from their government than they would if they were living or travelling in their own country. read more

Over the last century only three US Presidents have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (the first Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded in 1901).

Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906, for his work in bringing about various treaties including the 1905 peace treaty between Russia and Japan. He had been President for five years.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson won it in 1919. He founded the League of Nations. He had been president for six years.

Jimmy Carter won it in 2002 (21 years after the end of his presidency) for 'his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development'. He was President from 1977-81.

Just out of interest, here's a look at some of the US Presidents who didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize:

• Franklin D Roosevelt (President 1933-45), who stewarded the US through the Great Depression and World War II, and who drove the creation of the UN.
• Harry S Truman (President 1945-53), responsible for the Truman Doctrine (containing Communist power in Europe after the war), and the Marshall Plan, which helped stimulate economic recovery in post-war Europe.
• Ronald Reagan (President 1981-89), who sought to achieve 'peace through strength', and who negotiated treaties eliminating intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe and reducing strategic nuclear arsenals (the INF and START I Treaties).

And now for a brief look at some of the other notable Peace Prize winners this century:

The AFP is to conduct a war crimes investigation into the 1975 killing of the Balibo Five. This follows the NSW Coroner's finding late last year that the five were 'tracked and targeted by the Indonesian military before being killed by the invading force in Balibo'. According to the Coroner, the Indonesian military attempted to pass them off as combatants – trussing them up in military uniform with guns, photographing and then incinerating them.

These are serious allegations against former high-ranking officials, which deserve to be tested in a court of law. As with pursuits by various international criminal tribunals for atrocities in WWII, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, to name a few, it is open to aggrieved nations to seek justice. My colleague, Fergus Hanson, has researched in-depth the issue of war criminals living in Australia and has urged the Federal Government to act to fill legislative gaps and to adequately resource the task of bringing war criminals to justice, no matter the passage of time.

Last week, Trade Minister Simon Crean announced that 'the Australian Government will spend $20 million over the next four years to deliver a new international brand for Australia.' In his press release, he asserts that 'we need a cohesive brand that captures the essence of Australia and underscores the quality of all that we have to offer in sectors such as trade, investment and education.'

It seems to me that Mr Crean is seeking something which does not, and should not, exist. To try to capture the essence of Australia in one 'cohesive brand' would be to sell ourselves short and trivialise the message, in the same way that the 'Where the bloody hell are you?' campaign did.

To risk flogging a dead horse, the Senate Committee’s 2007 exhaustive report on Australia’s public diplomacy, which I talked about in a previous post, concluded that 'to be effective, Australia's public diplomacy must succeed in projecting messages that give greater breadth and substance to its image'. My emphasis, and note the plural.

Though prepared seven months ago, the Federal Government’s response to the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade on Australia’s public diplomacy is still worth a look. The original Senate Committee report in 2007 was a gruelling 244 pages. Despite its length, there were some gems – this from a DFAT insider: 'The reality is that Australian public diplomacy has been relegated to a level of importance equivalent to that of Embassy gardens. It's now almost exclusively managed around the world by locally engaged staff.'

The preface to the recommendations in the Report spells out some of the issues the Committee identified in Australia’s rusted-on public diplomacy 'program'. The committee was particularly concerned about:

• the low level of interest in, or awareness of, Australia's public diplomacy by many Australians;
• the lack of methodical and long-term research into attitudes toward Australia by countries that are of significance to Australia;
• the effectiveness of Australia's whole-of-government approach to public diplomacy in producing a cooperative, coordinated and united effort by the many agencies and organisations that contribute to, or have the potential to contribute to, Australia's public diplomacy, including Australia's diaspora;
• DFAT's ability to meet the growing challenges of conducting public diplomacy in a fiercely contested environment including matters such the resources devoted to public diplomacy, staff training and the role of locally engaged staff;
• the need to ensure that those responsible for managing and delivering public diplomacy programs are taking full advantage of advances in technology to reach the global audience; and
• the apparent absence of appropriate performance indicators suggesting that DFAT does not have mechanisms in place to monitor and assess adequately the effectiveness of its public diplomacy programs.

The Australian Government has a bit of work to do on the overseas image of Australian education. That’s no surprise. What is surprising is the lack of visible public diplomacy from the Federal Government on what is becoming a severe problem for Australia’s lucrative education export industry. Education is Australia’s top services export. It is the third largest export overall (after coal and iron ore). But, as reported by the ABC this week, the international education trade from India has been decimated.  

Then, to add insult to injury, this week saw the collapse of a large private college in Sydney.

You’d think Australian Education International (the government entity responsible for international education in Australia) might be dealing with the issues in a public and prominent way. But no, here’s a snapshot of its home page as of late this afternoon. 

Nothing. No hotline, no fact sheet, no information service, no contact numbers, no hints.  Just a bunch of acronyms, logos and an oblique acknowledgement that something might be afoot with the invitation to apply for an 'International Student Roundtable'.

Huh?

So, another hard decision in the 2009 budget: $654 million over six years for 'border protection', AKA preventing illegal boat arrivals and protecting us from the 'vilest form of human life', people smugglers.

Only 711 people have arrived in Australia since September last year, according to a report by Paul Maley and Matthew Franklin in The Australian yesterday. That would work out at around 1,000 per year at the current rate. So we’re going to spend rougly $100 million per year on keeping them out, or $100,000 for each boat person.

Then we add the following (according to in the same article, which draws from answers to Senate Committee questions on notice):

When calculated over the October-February period, the numbers show authorities spent more than $5.3 million on the 141 people who were in detention as of February 28 -- or $38,000 a detainee'.

That total consists of charter flights, detention service providers, interpreters and immigration staff costs and allowances. That’s a grand total of around $140,000 for every boat person this year. A high price for 'protection'.

I went to the Nutcracker last night. For some reason it reminded me of the Defence White Paper. No, really. There was a China scene in it, and it’s fantasy, after all.

Photo by Flickr user Deadalready Collection, used under a Creative Commons license.

Here are some interesting numbers from the latest report from the the UN Refugee Agency which Mike Steketee cited on asylum trends in industrialised countries.

There was a 12 per cent increase in 2007 to 2008 in asylum applications to industrialised countries. But Australia accounted for only 1.2% (4,750) of the total (382,670). In the 2007-08 reporting year, only 25 boat people arrived illegally in Australia. 

While applications for asylum in Australia have increased somewhat in the last year, to read the news, the hyperventilating reactions of opposition parliamentarians and the polls, anyone would think we are being swamped. The comments of the Prime Minister were pretty inflammatory as well.

We are not one of the world’s top 10 ‘receiving’ countries for asylum seekers More...

The (not) Pauline Hanson pictures caused quite a stir on both sides of the Tasman recently. On a visit to Wellington, several amused observers commented on La Hanson’s longevity and, ah, attraction. The impression of our trans-Tasman friends was that Pauline still wielded significant political sway, as evidenced by our media’s prurient interest in the latest controversy.

Seriously, though, what was surprising was the lingering impression among New Zealanders of Australia as a fundamentally racist society in which Hansonism still flourishes.  

From my side of the sea, her influence on Australian politics is reflected in successive election results:  More...