On Iraq's WMD, Flood lamented 'a failure rigorously to challenge preconceptions or assumptions about the Iraqi regime's intentions...there is little evidence that systematic and contestable challenging was applied in a sustained way to analysts' starting assumptions.'

Before the Bali bombings in 2002, Flood judged, 'Australia's foreign intelligence agencies underestimated in some important ways the nature of radical Islam in Southeast Asia and the extent to which regional extremists posed a threat to Australia.'

On Solomon Islands, analysts had described the decline in governance and society, 'but there was no clear assessment that the (2000) coup was likely.'

On Indonesia and East Timor in 1998-99, Flood went to some pains to dismiss the argument that had emerged from inside Defence that Australian intelligence estimates had been distorted by a 'pro-Jakarta lobby'.

One of the great strengths of the Flood effort was that his description of the intelligence community could encompass weak as well as strong points. It was that breadth that meant Flood won the day with his recommendation to double the cash being spent. Despite such failures, he said, the structure was sound and needed more money, not revolution.

Cornall and Black ignore this Flood example and too easily take the too-secret-to-say defence. For instance, Cornall-Black adopt without any apparent investigation the figures that Canberra now uses to characterise the success of the counter-terrorism effort:

The Australian Intelligence Community has helped keep the Australian homeland safe from terrorist attacks for a decade despite a series of major plots. Those disrupted plots resulted in 38 prosecutions and 22 convictions. Other potential plots have not been allowed to develop thanks to more than 80 foreign nationals being prevented from coming to Australia on security grounds and more than 50 Australians being denied the opportunity to travel to train for, support or participate in, terrorist activities.

A case-study review of this effort might, for instance, have made some judgment about how much this success was a result of the raft of new legal powers bestowed on the Complex. What lessons have been learnt? What mistakes, if any, have been made?

A big lack in Cornall-Black is any discussion of the contestability of assessments coming out of the intelligence agencies. Contestability was a theme running through the heart of the Flood report. Before his key chapter on Resourcing and Effectiveness of the Agencies, Flood devoted a whole chapter to contestability and the need for analysts to be 'challenged, confronted by different perspectives and alerted to flaws in their arguments.'

How well is the Australian system doing today on achieving contestability? If you are charged with doing a follow-on study to Flood, then contestability is a primary gauge of what Flood sought. All the key issues Cornall and Black were charged with examining (supporting national interests, reforms, working arrangements, practices, collaboration) would have a contestability dimension. Yet the word 'contestability' does not appear. Maybe all that went into the classified version.

The British Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman long ago described secrecy as 'the British disease', and it is one element of our inheritance that still throbs strongly in Canberra's political and bureaucratic veins. The disease produces eunuch reports, bowdlerised to the point of banality. The 50 pages graciously conferred on the public by The Independent Review of the Intelligence Community offer assertions without supporting argument, and conclusions without much context or contest.

Photo by Flickr user ocularinvasion. 

When you ask organisations like ASIO what do they need to make Australia secure in the age of terrorism, they go to quite extreme lengths, as our laws now do. The new ASIO building being built in the parliamentary triangle, I think it's a total offence to a democratic nation, I really do; we've had one really serious bomb incident in Australia and I was prime minister at the time, the Hilton bomb (in 1978). And I can remember asking everyone, 'Have you got enough power to deal with this?' 'We're not used to this in Australia. Is there any shortage of powers available to ASIO, the police?' 'No, no, what we need is better intelligence, better information.' Now, if you look at the extension of powers that have been put in place, it's an utter offence. People just sit down and accept it, you know. They can come in here and tap you on the shoulder: 'So we think you saw something, you're coming away with us.' You can't ring up family, husband, anyone; you can't even get a lawyer. You disappear for a while, while you are interrogated. And if you don't behave right, you can go to jail for five years.

One way of damning the Cornall-Black effort is to consider the job it does in addressing Fraser's concerns about the increase in the size and power of the Complex over the decade. The effort is Appendix 3, on 'Intelligence, Oversight, Safeguards and the Law', which comes to the comforting conclusion that after a 'decade of legislation creating new terrorism offences and conferring new powers', Australia has struck a new balance which 'remains right for the future we face.'

The sense of comfort is rather undercut by one of the last points the review makes: 

The use of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance platforms has been subject to criticism from human rights organisations. Close analysis of their concerns suggest that this is an area that requires considerably more deliberation. If the use of important new capabilities like these is to retain public support, there needs to be a clear articulation of any ethical issues involved in managing them effectively and the way they are used.

Yes, a clear articulation of ethical issues is always useful. Perhaps a philosopher like Professor Black (ethicist, theologian and management consultant) could have offered some thoughts on this in his report. Likewise, Robert Cornall (eight-and-a-half years at the head of Attorney-General's) could have gone beyond describing the oversight mechanisms to offer some thoughts on how well they work, or even provided a few examples beyond the fact that the appeal court overturned the Jack Thomas terrorism conviction.

The sharpest way to view the Cornall-Black effort is to do a taste-test comparison with its predecessor, the 2004 Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies by Philip Flood. The latest effort is supposed to build on and advance Flood's work, but the snack served up by Cornall-Black makes Flood's effort look like a banquet. More on that in a follow-up post.

The judges were strongly drawn to 'The Smirk', the moment at a press conference in October when the two leaders were asked if they were confident Italy's Silvio Berlusconi was capable of making economic reforms. The twin smile that question drew from Merkozy prompted a gale of laughter from journalists.

The Smirk, however, does not convey the dramatic tensions within the act. As the Charlemagne column notes: 'It is an old tenet of European politics that the Franco-German partnership is necessary to disguise German strength and French weakness.' The disguise is wearing thin. That is why Sarkozy has to work so hard to maintain the show of joint leadership. And that brings us to the image that best expresses the forces warring inside Merkozy. Pass the microphone to a veteran correspondent, the urbane Steven Erlanger:

She makes fun in private, of the way he walks and talks, of his rapid, jerky gestures and facial grimaces. He mocks her deliberation, her reluctance, her matronly caution. She has compared him to Mr. Bean and to the French comic Louis de Funès, with his curly hair and large nose. He sometimes calls her La Boche, the offensive French version of “Kraut,” and goes out of his way to give her an embrace and a double-cheeked kiss in the French fashion, the kind of contact that he knows very well, aides say, she cannot stand.

The crowning touch is bestowing the double-cheeked kiss on the woman with the money and the power, even though she dislikes such French flummery. Merkozy is a worthy winner of the Madeleine.

Photo by Flickr user francediplomatie.

On the umbrella front, Obama earns points with the Chinese even when he does have rain protection, just by carrying the brolly himself rather than having a flunky do the job. When the US President arrived in Shanghai in 2009, a China Daily columnist thought Obama made 'an immediate and positive impression' even as he stepped from the plane:  'It was all because Obama held his own umbrella. It was an iconic image, beating all the rhetoric...Simply put, few in the country he landed in would expect a president — any president of any organization — to hold an umbrella. That is the job of underlings.’ 

Still on the Diana Directive, consider the point China's leaders make by flying on an America-made Boeing. When Hu Jintao arrived in the US on a Jumbo, The Atlantic concluded that 'the aircraft is the message'.  

The Madeleine judges – ever alert to the use of symbols and props – have an eye for shoe throwing, as we recounted last year. We salute The Economist's effort at rendering the Arab Spring in graphic form by creating The Shoe-Thrower's Index, which aims to predict where the scent of jasmine may spread next.

From shoe-throwing we segue to date-shifting. Step forward Samoa for its action on the last day of 2011 in hopping westwards over the international date line, the better to align itself with Australia and New Zealand. Samoa has transformed its marketing pitch — no longer the last place on earth to see the sun set, now the first to see the sun rise. And those heading to Apia can enjoy themselves on both sides of the date line:

By taking an hour-long flight to the US territory of American Samoa, which will remain on the eastern side of the new and adjusted date line, visitors will be able to enjoy the unique experience of celebrating birthdays and anniversaries twice.

Talk about global positioning. 

All these are worthy Madeleine finalists. But one international performance in the last year has proven star power for its length, cast, cost and sheer drawn-out drama. The envelope is to hand. Silence, please. The winner is...to be announced tomorrow!

The anguish Fiji generates owes much to the strong emotions the military regime generates. Hitting the keyboard is one of the few political acts currently acceptable in Fiji. Yet Fiji has always been notable for the way its politics is played in a manner that is passionate and deeply personal. It's ironic that the nation which defined the Pacific Way in the conduct of regional affairs is so non-pacific in its internal affairs. 

The easiest way to explain this has always been the politics of race. As an Indian pol said to me in Suva a couple of decades ago: 'The trouble with Fiji is that we have too many Chiefs and too many Indians!' 

The humour in the line also had sting because of the bitter truth it expressed. But the politics of race is shifting in line with Fiji's demography. At the time of the Rabuka coups in 1987, the population was divided almost exactly 50-50 between Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Today, the trend line is heading towards two-thirds Fijians and one-third Indo-Fijians. Demography makes it easier to move towards democracy. The Supremo says he is going to do away with the politics of race and introduce one-man-one-vote. The weight of Fijian numbers should make that a less threatening prospect, even for the Fijian hardliners, strengthening Bainimarama's hand in moving to his promised election in 2014.

The Supremo has trained the region not to place too much reliance on his promises. But he has been making the 2014 promise for so long that even he would find it hard to chutzpah his way out of that pledge. Certainly, there are a lot of moves yet to be confronted, much less made. What sort of constitution? What sort of government? What sort of election?

The latest bit of showmanship from Suva suggests Bainimarama is finally starting to shift from being Mr NO! towards the day when he must propose rather than dispose. For the region, that means that over the next three years, the Supremo will move from being a greater to a lesser evil. Thus, Australia and the rest of the South Pacific can start to consider ways of dealing with Fiji that reach beyond the helpless Let it Bleed position.

Some previous thoughts on the course of Bainimarama's New Order are here and here, and the implications of the military as Fiji's strongest tribe.

High marks for timing and judgment to France's Foreign Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, (nickname MAM)  for offering French security forces to help with crowd control in Tunisia just a few days before the regime fell, becoming the first flower of the Arab Spring. Wham went the MAM as she exited the ministry.

The cut-and-paste award went to Germany's Defence Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, after the discovery that he'd plagiarised chunks of his doctoral thesis. Goodbye, Guttenberg.

Rather than poking fun at the pollies, however, this year's OOPS! will remember a great man who often saw the funny side of politics, even when the regime shunted him off to jail. Any man who could appreciate the political significance of Frank Zappa surely had a dry sense of humour. And Vaclav Havel's love of a joke was nearly as strong as his need for a smoke.

Some wonderful moments are recounted in this piece by the Oz lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, remembering the time when Havel was mustering both style and substance to pierce 'the Stalinist miasma that had wearily settled over Czechoslovakia'. With the secret police monitoring their every move, Robertson and Havel head to a Prague cafe. The US dollar is trading on the black market at 30 times the official rate, so Robertson pulls out some greenbacks to get the bill:

But when I tendered them to pay for our meal, Havel stopped me and explained (I kick myself for not realising) that he would immediately be rearrested by the watching police as an accomplice in black marketeering. 'This is the first rule of being a dissident,' he instructed me. 'You must scrupulously obey the law.'

A rare confession of error from G Robertson QC, and a wonderful lesson from the author of The Power of the Powerless: the man who proclaimed the need to 'live in truth' knew you had to choose carefully which laws to break.

Here is another moment, at the end of the trial of a dissident, when the secret police qualify for an OOPS! because of their attention to detail:

When we emerged on the steps of the court for Havel to announce the result to several hundred waiting supporters, they struck up a ragged chorus of We Shall Overcome. 'You can always tell who are the secret police on these occasions,' explained Havel with a tight grin. 'They are the ones who know all the words.'

The crowning OOPS! moment, though, was when President Havel paid a visit to Australia as an official guest of government. The relatively rare itinerary request from Prague was that the President would like to see the Rock.

Getting to Uluru in the centre of the continent is a major test of time and logistics, well beyond the schedule of most visiting presidents and prime ministers. Usually, the VIP gets Canberra and Sydney and a quick trip up to the Barrier Reef if they can squeeze in a couple of extra days. For Havel, though, the schedule was upended so that he could get to the Northern Territory to gaze at one of the great wonders of Oz. Granted, Havel didn't look all that awe-struck in the pictures, but perhaps that was just the jet-lag.

As he was leaving Oz at the end of the tour, Havel set the record straight with a wry smile. What he'd actually asked to see was some great Oz rock (and roll), not the Rock. Vale Vaclav. We reckon you would have enjoyed the OOPS!

Photo by Flickr user Black Glenn.

To give you an idea of prize-winning performances, here are the previous two awards: a brilliant bluff by a US diplomat that helped clinch a peace deal, and a seaworthy climate change stunt, an island nation holding a cabinet meeting under the waves. Plus, here are some of the contenders from last year that didn't reach the final round.

As well as helping us select the Madeleine winner, you can also help judge our other prize: the OOPS! Award. The Madeleine and the OOPS! represent opposites. The Madeleine marks the use of symbol and signal; the OOPS! is a reward for snafu, stuff-up or cross-border misunderstanding. Here's our account of last years OOPS! contenders in the blunders genre.

To give you the flavour of what we're after in the OOPS! category, though, we step from the world of politics and diplomacy to the more precise world of science for a magnificent tribute to human error. This was more than a decade ago when the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter didn't go into orbit around Mars but instead crashed into the planet.

The reason for the crash was a mix-up between the navigational team in California and the spacecraft's operational team in Colorado. One team was using metric units to quantify the force exerted by the probe's thrusters while the other was using imperial units. Thus, data passed between the two groups were interpreted incorrectly and the craft's trajectory was wrong by 80km (50 miles). Crash, burn and OOPS! See here for The Economist's account of various OOPS! moments in space.

Back here on Earth, please send us your thoughts on who is worthy of a Madeleine and who slipped up enough to earn an OOPS!

On the sidelines of the APEC summit in Hawaii, the nine TPP leaders (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US, and Vietnam) announced the 'broad outlines' of an agreement 'to establish a comprehensive, next-generation regional agreement that liberalizes trade and investment and addresses new and traditional trade issues and 21st-century challenges.' The big bang was the claim that the deal will be done in the next 12 months.

What also grabbed attention was Japan's announcement that it would like to get on board the TPP; although given Japan's past refusals to tinker with some of its own economic rigidities in exchange for trade deals, Tokyo's ability to accept the US demands intrinsic to the Partnership must be questioned.

One irony of the TPP announcement (or, re-announcement, as the leaders did something similar the previous year) is that it happened at an APEC summit. In the first decade after APEC's creation, there was a mighty battle at the heart of the institution between American visions of an exclusionary trade pact and the Australia-Japan embrace of non-discrimination that traveled under the title of 'open regionalism.'

Not the least of the peculiar effects being contemplated here is how Canberra seems to be giving in to the US lawyers who masquerade as trade negotiators while abandoning the important benefits Australia has long drawn from open regionalism's explicit rejection of discrimination.

Ponder the history for a moment. Paul Keating was the Prime Minister who in 1992 promised: 'Australia would not be party to any trade arrangement which was directed against Japan.' At the time, Keating was making an important point that was also a statement of the obvious. Japan then stood at the centre of Australia's trade interests in the same manner that China does today. And when Keating spoke, Tokyo and Canberra were still glorying in their joint creation of APEC as a vision of open Asia Pacific economic cooperation that greatly enhanced their national and regional interests.

Today, Julia Gillard could not adopt the Keating position. If the US idea of the TPP arrives, it will be a structure that is most emphatically directed against China. That is one reason why Japan is scrambling towards joining. Ernie Bower sees a real competition under way between the US and China to define how Asia's economic integration will proceed:

The US-led model is deep and requires massive political commitments by governments to legally bind themselves and reform current regulations and practices. The China-led model is relatively shallow and easier for governments to join. It is high-profile, with nonbinding agreements expressing general intent and some specifics around tariffs, but it includes little on other commercially important rules and regulations.

A lot of traps and rough terrain stand in the way of the TPP aim to complete negotiations by the end of next year — not least the minor matter of the election of the US President. But even making the Partnership effort raises all sorts of questions about who is in and who is out and what the end point might look like.

Peter Drysdale headlines it as the 'economic containment' of China and judges: 'Whoever dreamt up this strategy has been thinking in the corner of a little box unrelated to geo-economic-political-security reality.' What is a Trans-Pacific dream that does not manage to recognise China, India and Indonesia?

Well, it is a vision driven by a US view of intellectual property rights and labour and environmental standards. That is the arena that the trade negotiators of Washington know so well. But while the lawyers are doing their work, the politicians may not be paying proper attention. As Shiro Armstrong argues, the central strategic challenge for the TPP must be whether China is in or out: 'The biggest risk of the TPP is political: that it might divide the region strategically between its members and the rest, with China being on the outside.'

China on the outside? A strategic divide? For Australia, this should be both a bizarre proposition and the nightmare scenario. Instead, it is at the centre of Canberra's trade policy for 2012. It would be a diabolical way to align alliance and trade interests.

Lots of labels are applied to the attempt to force peace at the point of a bayonet: humanitarian intervention, liberal imperialism, armed social work, military humanitarianism, nation-building under fire, saving failed states, enlightened militarism. The descriptions can be antagonistic, ambivalent or ambitious.

In UN-speak, the newest label is the Responsibility to Protect (RtP or r2p): an attempt to systematise the use of military power to protect people from their own governments. For such an innocuous phrase, the Responsibility to Protect seeks to sidestep a lot of history, not least the sovereign right of governments to do whatever they want inside their own borders.

The NATO war in the skies over Libya was a display of RtP military muscle. In helping to protect the Libyan people from their own government, NATO took a UN resolution and interpreted RtP as the Responsibility to do Precision-bombing. The intervention was messy and deadly, but the aims of the UN resolution were met. Libya will go on the UN honour roll of bayonet moments that worked, alongside names like Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia and Kosovo. 

That list illustrates the shift in UN language from the complex passivity of 'peacekeeping' to the armed ambitions of 'humanitarian intervention'. The UN peacekeeping tradition is about observing and monitoring ceasefires and peace deals; the new norm being born is about the use and utility of force.

And that brings us to Iraq and Afghanistan, where successful conquests mutated into the messiest of interventions, bloody illustrations that any answer to the bayonet conundrum is always mixed and conditional: when the military and morality merge at the point of intervention, muddle and morass can mingle in with the proper use of might. Much can go wrong even as a few good things can go right.

Photo by Flickr user Carlos Smith. 

I make a ten-minute presentation and then each of the 15 members, represented by their Ambassadors, gives me their views. They are informed, but their varying narratives based on a single set of facts reminds me how hard diplomacy can be, particularly in a multilateral setting. No wonder they find it so challenging to agree on all the major issues facing the world; the Arab Spring, Iran, Burma, climate change, economics. These days there is no ideological difference between the members of the Security Council. Their differences are based entirely on national interest. Which tells multilateralists something about the reality of multilateral diplomacy; it’s just a bunch of countries pushing their own barrows, but in the one room.

The bleak realism position personified.

Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies too was inclined to a rueful sigh about 'that strange melange of disunited nations known as the United Nations.' And Downer may have been channeling one of his Liberal ministerial predecessors, Paul Hasluck. Reflecting on his days as a young diplomat during the formation of the UN, Hasluck judged that Labor External Affairs Minister Bert Evatt seemed 'to lose sight of the rocks of power politics under the full flood of internationalism.'

Evatt's passion for the UN has enabled Labor to mix a strong multilateral flavour into the depiction of its own history. Yet, for all the hopes that Evatt invested in the UN, he was also the key author of a successful amendment to the draft Charter which limited the right of the Security Council to interfere in domestic affairs of member states:

Article 2(7): Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

Evatt fought for the 'domestic jurisdiction' article as insurance for the White Australia policy, to ensure Australia's migration policy could not be made subject to the orders of the Security Council. Labor's patron saint for all things multilateral wanted some limits.

Casting aside nuance (a useful rule for pundits and columnists), the Australian argument about the UN can be divided into two strands: Evatt Enthusiasm or Menzies Scepticism. One innovation of John Howard's leadership was to introduce a third strand, going beyond the scepticism and sniping characteristic of Menzies. This column dubbed it Howard Rejectionism and offered up evidence from Howard's autobiography. 

It is interesting that multilateralism is one of the few policy battlegrounds where Howard didn't seek to steal Labor's clothes, or at least refashion the garment. In many other areas, from the allegiance of working class 'battlers' to ownership of the word 'mate', Howard was deft and diligent in snatching Labor totems. On multilateral institutions, though, Howard deserted the ground claimed by Labor. That was not the usual positioning of a canny leader who always prided himself on understanding the sentiments flowing through the average backyard BBQ debate. 

Howard's rejectionist sentiment has captured modern Liberalism to the extent that the Coalition is opposing Labor's effort to be elected to a seat on the Security Council. And that rejectionism will be one element in the Liberal campaign against the carbon tax. The Howard shift means Kevin Rudd can mount the case that Howard 'systematically denigrated' (subscription) the UN. Labor could never make quite the same case about Menzies.

Beyond whacking at Howard's UN hostility, the real test for Rudd is winning that race for a Security Council seat in 2013-14. See here for Michael Fullilove's elegant explanation of why Australia is running against Luxembourg and Finland for one of the two spots on the Council reserved for the members of the Western European and Others Group.

Not the least in Australian problems with the UN may be grappling with the truth that in defining our place in the world, Oz belongs with the 'Others'. And in the race to beat Luxembourg into second place, things may not be going too well. Rudd is being 'coy' when questioned on Australia's chances of coming second. When was the last time you thought of The Kevin as being coy about anything?

Above, Herbert Evatt with Alger Hiss at the 1945 San Francisco Conference to agree upon the UN Charter. Photo by Flickr user UN Photo.

The proposition is that Labor will improve Australia's relationship with India by following the policy example of John Howard's Coalition Government (although Howard's shift on uranium didn't get him any credit points from India in seeking the ultimate job for a cricket tragic; linkage across spheres is always difficult).

The policy now being adopted by Gillard doesn't have that much to do with Buffett (markets) but lots to do with Bismarck (grand strategy and shifting national alignments). The lukewarm response of Australia's uranium producers rather underlines the point that this argument is about something much more than selling a commodity.

The key elements here are India's power, US policy and the impact on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT is what is suffering, although the two articles by Martine Letts demonstrate how Australia could seek to strengthen the non-proliferation regime in trying to negotiate with India. The outcome Martine describes will require some hard thinking and tough negotiation. And giving the other side what it wants before the bargaining begins is hardly good tactics.

The marathon march towards a Free Trade Agreement with China is an excellent example. To launch the negotiations, Canberra gave Beijing what it most fervently wanted: recognition of China's status as a Market Economy. Six years later, the talks drag on. In the same way, what India really needs from Australia is recognition, not uranium. And the Labor Party is about to hand over that important gift.

So, when those negotiations with India do begin, Australia needs to be clear about its aim: to bolster the non-proliferation structure, not to bow. That requires an ability to look past India's self-serving and often misleading depiction of its nuclear interests and actions. Such an endeavour could draw inspiration from a long-ago Australian High Commissioner to New Delhi, who recorded this reflection on the difference between Australian and Indian approaches to international affairs:

There was not much in India's policies to emulate. Yet, wrong-headed and hypocritical as India's policies sometimes were, one's mind was gripped by the undeviating direction of India towards national self-interest without concession to sentiment towards others, or to the 'loyalty' so evident in Australian official policies towards our 'traditional friends'.

The words are from one of the great Canberra mandarins, Sir Arthur Tange, who served in India for five years after his time as secretary of the External Affairs Department (1954-65) and before taking the top job in the Defence Department (1970-79). As the flintiest of realists, Tange might observe that this time round both India and Australia seem to be playing the roles he described for them. Australia, particularly, is making loyal haste to adopt the new India position adopted by our great and powerful friend in Washington.

Photo by Flickr user Pulkitsinha.

Not all changes may be bad. The Islands could have fewer droughts and fewer tropical cyclones. But when the cyclones do hit, they will be extreme — and the Pacific already knows how terrible those can be.

Some of the thoughts and findings on offer:

• All North and South Pacific Islands are very likely to warm during this century. The warming is likely to be somewhat smaller than the global annual mean warming in all seasons (70% as large as the global average warming).
• Sea levels are likely to continue to rise, on average, during the 21st century. Large deviations among models make regional estimates across the Pacific Ocean uncertain.
• The past decade has been the warmest on record and ocean acidity levels are continuing to increase because of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
• Annual rainfall is likely to increase in the equatorial Pacific, while most models project decreases just east of French Polynesia in December-February. Many islands will experience extreme rainfall.
• A large increase in hot days and warm nights.
• The El Nino effect will play all sorts of different tricks from year to year, especially on cyclones.
• Projected changes in humidity and solar radiation are also relatively small (less than 5% by 2090).

Now to the many ripples. Look at some of the negative effects — those who got a whack from the Gillard shift and the way it was done:

• Kevin Rudd.
• The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
• The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• The Labor Party's policy taboo about Australian uranium sales.

 And what of the winners?

• India.
• The US and its Civil Nuclear Agreement with India.
• Julia Gillard asserts her leadership and growing mastery of foreign policy, plus her ability to bend the Labor Party to her wishes, even on a taboo issue.

Each of these ripples is important in its own right. Stick, though, to what all this says about the prime minister and her foreign minister. The poisonous atmosphere has got to the stage that the two don't consult each other because of fears about what the other would do with sensitive information. Gillard didn't tell Rudd about her change on India because the news could be leaked at a moment that would do her maximum damage.

This was not just about altering the ALP's policy platform. It was a major moment in Australian diplomacy with India and for the way Australia thinks about the NPT. There is much to play for in such a change. In normal times, the prime minister and foreign minister would have spent hours talking it through and seeking the advantages to be gained in such a big shift.

If Australia was ready to give India a diplomatic win, what could it have sought in exchange in a negotiation rather than a unilateral concession? At the very least, Canberra could go looking to tighten some of the many gaps in the US agreement with India. And if Australia was really ambitious, it could have sought to drag India closer to the NPT.

Such complex work, however, requires some measure of leverage and ability to negotiate. Gillard threw all that away. She has told India quite explicitly that it has won. Not much leverage there. As prime minister, Rudd reversed the Howard Government decision to sell uranium to India. As foreign minister, he now has to support the position he overturned. If Gillard actually trusted her foreign minister, she could have given him a reasonably strong hand in seeking a deal with New Delhi. Rudd pointed to some of those elements in his Sales' interview:

I've already gone on the public record in Bangalore in the last 48 hours saying I support the Prime Minister's position. Of course the other part of this is to ensure that the government of India would be prepared to accept the conditionalities attached, and that goes to bilateral nuclear safeguards arrangements with the government of India, on top of India's undertakings already to a group called the Nuclear Suppliers Group. And that involves a separation of civilian from military facilities, a greater inspectorate role for the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as a number of other conditions which India has already signed up to. So it's those arrangements plus the Australian bilateral safeguards arrangements, and I'll also be keen to explore with the Indians over time their position on the future of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, and the Proliferation Security Initiative as well. There's much to discuss with the Indians and let's just remember even though the Right of the Australian Labor Party, which supports this approach represent 55% of the ALP Conference, and the Left which opposes it broadly represent 45% of the Conference. I think you're likely to anticipate a strong debate, although I think the numbers are there to support the Prime Minister.

There is, indeed, much to discuss with India. But a negotiation that starts with Australia announcing that it now accepts India's demand is not going to produce much of a shift in New Delhi's position on anything. This is certainly an important moment in Australia's dealings with India. Unfortunately, one lesson that India may draw is that giving Canberra a few whacks can force changes that carry no costs.

Equally, this is a significant moment in the strange dynamic between Gillard and Rudd. When the foreign minister is so open about being dudded by the prime minister, there is not much left in the relationship and everything to play for.

Photo by Flickr user Sergiu Bacioiu.

As the column on the 60th birthday of ANZUS mused, that potency explains much about why Australia keeps volunteering for US wars — the blood price that is regularly paid. The payment is a product of current opinion polls and the continuing tithe set by history. Those who contributed £100,000 to have the American memorial built in Canberra in 1952 were the people who had just lived through Australia's great moment of truth in the 20th century.

The memorial marks the national trauma and existential struggle involved in the fall of Singapore, the attacks on Darwin (the Japanese sent as many planes as they did at Pearl Harbor), the battle of the Coral Sea and the fight for New Guinea. As Coral Bell has observed, this patch of history has 'haunted Australian strategic inquiry every since'.

Coral also produced one of the great books on the alliance, certainly the one with the sharpest title: Dependent Ally. The sense of dependence is not quite as deep as it was 27 years ago when Coral brought out her first edition, but the label is still apt. Kim Beazley, the former Labor leader now ambassador to Washington, has made the argument that the balance of advantage in the US-Australia alliance 'has shifted to the Americans'.

It is a tough case to win. But Obama's announcement of increased US use of Australian military facilities will speak to an easier argument about mutual interests and some mutual dependence in specific areas. Thus, the politics of the Obama announcement will be overwhelmingly pro-American. Labor and the Coalition will line up together to applaud an increased US military presence on Australian soil. The Greens will oppose. The divide roughly reflects the pro-US state of the Lowy polls.

One way to understand why the alliance is so deeply entrenched is to go out the front door of Parliament House and walk on to the right of the forecourt to the point where you can look along the length of Kings Avenue. At the far end of the avenue stands a tall symbol that is also a sentinel of the Australia-American relationship.

Photo by Flickr user KLW NFC.

The inner demands that are directed precisely at the successful journalist are especially difficult. It is, indeed, no small matter to frequent the salons of the powerful on this earth on a seemingly equal footing and often to be flattered by all because one is feared, yet knowing all the time that having hardly closed the door the host has perhaps to justify before his guests his association with the 'scavengers from the press.' Moreover, it is no small matter that one must express oneself promptly and convincingly about this and that, on all conceivable problems of life — whatever the 'market' happens to demand — and this without becoming absolutely shallow and above all without losing one's dignity by baring oneself, a thing which has merciless results. It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men.

Ah, Kevin, be careful where you venture.

In taking to the opinion pages, Rudd is attending to one of the growing tasks of the modern Australian foreign minister: the media role of commentator-in-chief. As a previous column noted, the duty statement for the commentator-in-chief has grown over the past two decades to the point where it has acquired some structural or institutional status. The foreign minister fronts the microphones continually to announce, comment and predict. 

In his op-eds, Rudd ranges widely: NATO, Burma, G20, North Korea, the Commonwealth. When Rudd puts himself on the page, though, there can be moments of personal reporting. Take this from March:

The Saturday before last, I sat down in Cairo with some of the young people who led the popular revolution in Egypt. Among the many remarkable things about this group, I noticed that a good third of them were women; very diverse women, from human rights activists to modern secularists to members of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Egypt's revolution was diverse in many ways, not least because it was a movement of women as much as of men.

Most of the time, the op-ed tone is direct and upbeat, as you'd expect from the commentator-in-chief. And like any good freelance, Rudd spreads his work. His musings have popped up with Fairfax, Murdoch, the West Australian and the ABC. But he certainly does seem partial to writing for the Daily Telegraph and the Australian; no doubt just the opportunity to talk to both the tabloid and the broadsheet audiences. As Weber would have observed, so much to do, so many boards to bore.

Photo courtesy of DFAT.

The most bizarre element was that the leaders refused to order the official publication of the report from their own Eminent Persons Group. This produced the strange outcome that the Commonwealth proceeded to accept, defer and reject EPG recommendations that had not formally seen the light of day. So it was that the communiqué pronounced:

Responding to the remaining EPG recommendations as follows:

1. adopting without reservation 30 recommendations
2. adopting, subject to consideration of financial implications, 12 further recommendations
3. asking the Task Force of Ministers to provide more detailed advice on 43 other recommendations to Foreign Ministers at their September meeting in New York, as a basis for further decision by Heads; and
4. deeming 11 recommendations inappropriate for adoption. 

The eminent persons have clearly proved not to be sound chaps if only one-third of their ideas were judged immediately suitable. Little wonder that the British eminence, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, called the result a disgrace that raised questions about the relevance of the Commonwealth, while the EPG chairman, Malaysia's Abdullah Badawi, thought it rendered the summit a failure.

Apparently, big members of the club such as South Africa, India and Sri Lanka were not too keen on creating a new set of standards on democracy and human rights that would immediately start to bite them in sensitive places. The summit didn't actually kill the recommendation for a Commonwealth Commissioner for Democracy, the Rule of Law and Human Rights. Instead, the idea has been sent away for further study.

So Perth managed to reach agreement on the rights of as yet unborn royal humans while not being so 'brave' on human rights.

The wrangle over the Commissioner brings to mind a classic Commonwealth story. In a burst of benevolence for a deposed foe, the Hawke Government decided to nominate the previous Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, for the job of secretary-general of the Commonwealth. Ahead of the vote at the CHOGM in Kuala Lumpur in 1989, Malcolm had been jetting around pledging that he'd put new force and energy into running the Commonwealth.

The Australians were quietly confident that with a bit of extra summit urging from Bob Hawke, they just might win the vote for Fraser. As the moment of decision approached, Margaret Thatcher turned her attention to the race. She rang all the other leaders saying they should take the former Australian prime minister at his word. 'Do you realise,' Thatcher warned, 'if Malcolm gets in, he'll want to do things!'. Exit Malcolm.

Those who want the Commonwealth to do things will always confront difficulties at Commonwealth summits.

The PR industry is getting stronger and stronger. "Bulking up as if it's on steroids," someone has said...And increasingly, overworked journalists battling the 24-hour tyranny, and news organizations forced to do it on the cheap, will be sitting ducks.

Prediction 3: Political journalists will be bypassed more and more.

In the last US presidential campaign, all the candidates made the rounds of the comedy shows. David Letterman announced, only half-joking: "The road to the White House runs through me"...In the US, Barack Obama's communications director has taunted members of the Washington press corps that eventually they could be rendered obsolete through the use of presidential messages posted directly onto YouTube and other internet sites.

Prediction 4: Bloggers will start to usurp the role of determining what is news.

...the greatest challenge is the risk that the blogosphere, with its tendency to rush to judgement and circulate scuttlebutt, will push the mainstream media into a race to the bottom.

For all its meat, treat the Oakes' lecture as entrée for the marvellous memoirs of Rob Chalmers, 'Inside the Canberra Press Gallery: Life in the Wedding Cake of Old Parliament House'. The book can be downloaded for free. Arriving in the gallery in 1951, Rob stayed pounding out words from Parliament for the next 60 years until his death this year, covering 12 prime ministers, 24 federal elections and five changes of government.

The yarns are classic Chalmers – sharp analysis delivered with Rob's broad grin and a slight cocking of the head, the better to hear the next juicy morsel.

The book shows there has never been a golden age in the deals and duels between hacks and pollies: a symbiotic relationship that continually erupts into war. Consider as one example Chalmers' account of an 'historic injustice' in 1955 when the House of Representative summoned a journalist and editor to the bar of the House and then sent to the two to jail, on a motion moved by the Prime Minister.

To see some of the origins of Oakes' worry about the power of spin, see Chalmers' chapter on The Influence Seekers. Or just surf through and savour the stories and the personalities.

Rob Chalmers has done Canberra proud, as he always did. Yet, gentleman that he was, he never hesitated to make the hard calls when he fronted the keyboard. Here are the opening words of Rob's final chapter:

The political system must be turned on its head. After nearly 60 years of observing politics from the gallery, I believe the system has lost its way. The competition for ideas is constrained as parliamentary colleagues of the Prime Minister or Opposition Leader are required to fall in behind whatever policies they hand down from on high. Before new policies are introduced, the political leaders give too much weight to the political advantage or disadvantage that might follow. There is excessive attention devoted to market research and devising the best spin for new policies, and not enough to the intrinsic merits or otherwise of policies. The stranglehold on political power by the two major parties, Labor and Liberal, needs to be broken. We need more parties, not less, and a system that will encourage the participation of the grassroots of parties in policy formulation. Rigid party discipline and television have combined to transform the Prime Minister from a party leader to an elected dictator and celebrity. Few prime ministers or presidents in modern Western democracies are as powerful as the Australian Prime Minister.

There will be some irony in the political blessing Barack Obama offers Gillard when he touches down in Oz. If Obama hadn't cancelled his planned visit last year, the timing of the presidential visit might have stayed the hand of the plotters who cut down Kevin Rudd (although the imminent arrival of George Bush Snr didn't stop Keating from toppling Hawke, so presidential magic has its limits).

By the time Gillard adjusts her sights for Labor's national conference in December, she will need some evidence that she has started to change the political storyline. December is the time when Labor has a habit of regicide, to clear the decks and install a new captain for the new year (knifing Kevin in winter was just one of the timing problems with last year's coup). Gillard has to start her rebuild from here, and the slew of summits would offer any leader a chance to reshape the national conversation.

Hosting the Commonwealth is the gentle place to begin. The visit by the Queen and the Commonwealth summit are a reminder of much that created Australia. Yet Australia's interests will be less engaged by what is discussed in Perth than what will follow at the G20, APEC and the EAS. It is a mark of Australian diplomatic success in recent decades that the Commonwealth is no longer the big international event for the prime minister, as it was all the way through till the 1980s. 

Malcolm Fraser was probably the last prime minister who truly valued the Commonwealth as a major instrument of Australian foreign policy. Even Fraser, though, sought to create a new regional version of the Commonwealth to serve Australia's aims in the Asia Pacific. The Fraser effort stands in a long Australian tradition of trying to find uses for the Commonwealth — the 'wither or whither' debate that has run for decades.

The Commonwealth probably doesn't have much to offer Gillard in pondering the import of the Asian Century. Indeed, it's ironic that the prime minister will not be welcoming the prime minister of India to Perth, but is due to see him at the G20 and the EAS. The creation of the modern Commonwealth, after all, was a response to the creation (independence) of modern India.

One thing that will mark the Perth summit as a different meeting of minds to those at the EAS and APEC will be the emphasis on democratic values, or the British sales pitch about the Commonwealth as the soft power network of the future.

It's most unlikely that the EAS would ever consider an Eminent Persons Group report calling for the creation of a Commissioner for Democracy, Rule of Law and Human Rights. If the Commonwealth is to add real value on a crowded international stage, it is the democratic software it enshrines, built into its DNA through language, law and legislature.

For an Australia pondering what influence it can have on the software of the new Asia Pacific system, that democratic emphasis will stand in novel contrast to some of the summits next month.

Keating has just completed the final item on his Seattle itinerary — a visit to the Boeing factory. The Australian hacks gather for a doorstop. For them, 'Keating triumphs in Seattle' was the story from the previous day. Now they want to talk about Dr Mahathir, the one Asia Pacific leader who declined to attend. Take it away, Prime Minister:

Keating: 'Please don't ask me any more questions about Dr Mahathir. I couldn't care less, frankly, whether he comes or not.'

Question: Will you see him next year, Prime Minister?

Keating: 'Yes. I'll see him in his own right. Malaysia is a country which Australia has interests with, and which is a neighbour, and I'll see him on those terms. But APEC is bigger than all of us; Australia, the US and Malaysia and Dr Mahathir and any other recalcitrants. I mean, APEC is a very big development in world affairs and, I think, ushers in a period of important cooperation.'

By Keating standards it was the gentlest of swipes. But Dr M had just been hugely outplayed — even outclassed — by the success of the summit he'd boycotted. Australia had a win — and to make matters worse, Suharto had embraced the achievement. On his flight back to Jakarta from Seattle, Suharto was asked by journalists traveling with him whether Mahathir was likely to attend the 1994 summit to be hosted by Indonesia. Suharto's response was a one-sentence masterpiece: 'I will invite him and I expect that he will come'. Whatever his anti-APEC language before Seattle, the Malaysian leader could not ignore such a Javanese command from Suharto.

'Recalcitrant' gave Dr M the chance to be offended instead of embarrassed. And the Malaysians went into full-on offended mode. Here is Mahathir embracing the 'r' words as a badge of honour:

...when Keating called me recalcitrant I was not angry — he was just saying that I was refusing to fall in line with everybody else and that description generally applies quite well to me. I don't always do what others do. Most Malaysians like this side of me, as it has allowed our country to show that it is able and ready to stand up for itself. But people expected me to be offended by Keating's remark and they were insulted on my behalf. As I did not want to embarrass them, I played along. (p. 697)

As anyone who dealt with Mahathir in his prime knows, this is tosh. This was not a man who 'played along' unless it suited him. A more accurate account of Mahathir motivations is offered earlier in his own tome. The most succinct version of Mahathir's Australia hangup is bracketed with his dismissal of John Howard as the US 'deputy sheriff in Southeast Asia', linked to this broader putdown: 'Australia liked to be an appendage of the US and if that is what it wants, then so be it. It certainly is not East Asian or Asian.'

The Mahathir view was always that Australia, if pressed, would side with the US rather than Asia. In the Mahathir conception of Asia, the Australians did not belong. And to counter APEC, Mahathir set out to build his own East Asia Caucus — the caucus without caucasians. Mahathir writes that Australia used APEC to counter his Caucus initiative, and that was why he refused to go to Seattle:

I thought it improper for Australians to use the President of the US to force East Asian countries to promote an Australian initiative. I stood firm and refused. Paul Keating, the then Australian Prime Minister, was very upset. He saw the formation of APEC as a glorious Australian achievement. Awed by the power and wealth of the US, he could not imagine anybody refusing to do their bidding and he famously branded me a recalcitrant. I really did not mind because I did not set much store by what he thought. I preferred simply to ignore his indiscretion. But Malaysians and the Malaysian press, thinking I had been insulted, condemned Keating for his bad manners. After that I had to show my displeasure as well, because as a politician, I could not dissociate myself from strongly-held public opinion. (p.615)

In retirement, Keating said that 'deep issues about the future of the region rather than personal animosity' lay behind his disagreements with Mahathir over APEC and the East Asia Economic Caucus: 'Dr Mahathir is a formidable leader who has transformed Malaysia in ways I greatly admire, but we have different visions of the region into the 21st century. The driving force in his vision was a strong pan-Asian nationalism which asserted that the time had come after centuries of colonial rule for Asia to take control of its own future.'

Australia's interests were clearly at odds with Mahathir's Asian triumphalism. Australia wanted membership of any new regional bodies. And Canberra saw the Malaysian Caucus as creating a split in the Pacific which would exclude the US as well as Australia. Keating perceived multiple dangers — economic, social and strategic — in such institution-building by Mahathir. But Keating's fierce advocacy of APEC as the pre-eminent regional organisation tended to slip into a campaign for APEC as the only institution.

Next month, the body that stands closest in imagination and lineage to Mahathir's vision, the East Asia Summit, welcomes the US President for the first time. The EAS structure, if not all the members (the US, India, Russia, Australia and New Zealand) answers elements of what Mahathir reached for.

Asia still argues about who is in, who is out and who drives. There's still a lot of room for a recalcitrant.

Photo by Flickr user World Economic Forum.

The senior diplomats, knowing how hard the bilateral bit can be, weren't keen on new vistas opening up too quickly. My pushback argument was that a new Asia Pacific system or machinery (the concert by another name) is coming into being.

The software perspective is that middle powers like South Korea and Australia can have some impact on the code that runs the machinery — to operationalise or shape the behaviour of the system. In considering what South Korea and Australia can do together, two bits of history offer hope.

Back in 1989, Bob Hawke made his speech launching the idea of APEC in Seoul, and South Korea's immediate embrace of the concept gave it a boost (and galvanised some angry attention from Washington). Then in 2008-9, the two middle powers did a lot of the pushing that helped ensure the G20 knocked off the G7 to become the premier global economic institution.

Widening the bilateral lens, I argued that in trying to scribble new software for the Asia Pacific, the KIA would be an excellent vehicle — Korea, Indonesia and Australia. I gave the KIA model a bit of a drive in a column last year from Jakarta, suggesting this could be one of the many new vehicles in a burgeoning multilateral motorcade, the grand prix events that now include the G20, the East Asia Summit, APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum.

The common democratic struggles of South Korea and Indonesia produce a strong starting point for such software ruminations. You can't have quite the same dreams about Vietnam, for instance.

Diplomats are careful of dreams. The first trackers on both sides were more interested in getting stronger bilateral supports in place, not least an Australia-Korea Free Trade Agreement. But even diplomats have ambitions. The one that leaps out from the 2009 action plan is the idea of two-plus-two talks: Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministers. The concept speaks to the alliance DNA in Canberra which is given yearly expression in the Australia-United States AUSMIN talks.

Australia has only a few other two-plus-two arrangements: with Japan and Britain and last year announced the agreement to create one with Indonesia. Setting up regular joint Foreign Affairs and Defence Minister talks with South Korea would certainly get us to the table with another nation as obsessed with the US alliance as we are. Then the software discussion can really get going.

May The Force be with them.

Photo by Flickr user Riebart.

Architecture suggests something permanent and solid — well designed, even — sitting on an established foundation with all the rooms in place and a roof nailed on. We ain't got that. Equally, the Asia Pacific in the 21st century is not going to respond too happily to a 19th century version of power politics. Machinery has a lot of moving parts, and allows for a plenty of further tinkering, alterations and additions in a Heath-Robinson-meets-Bruce Petty manner.

All this is part of my response to the question Rory poses: Does Australia have a strategy for dealing with the new Asia, especially the rise of China and India? Answer: to work, our strategy is going to have to look a lot like that of all the other middle powers in the game, and also answer many of the needs of the big players. And the existing machinery or system is what is going to have to work.

Giving up on using 'concert' is a bit of wrench. I have been a fan for quite a while, standing behind two thinkers I deeply admire: Coral Bell and Hugh White. As she so often does, Coral described the terms of the debate in the most lucid and sweeping terms — process, players and end-point — in her 2007 Lowy Paper talking about a Concert of Powers for the 21st Century. Hugh in his Quarterly Essay went boldly to battle for a 'Concert of Asia' (and has the wounds to prove it).

My support all along, however, has been wimpish, because I have been a concert not a Concert advocate; Australia never has much luck running big C arguments, whether for Hawke's APEC Community or Rudd's Asia Pacific Community. And with a Concert, we hit some of the same rocks.

Shrinking the target to a concert, though, has not done the trick. The problems with the concert have been nearly as strong on the US side as with various Asian audiences. The US doesn't like the suggestion that it must surrender power to others, while Asia just hates the 19th century European baggage.

When throwing the Asia Pacific concert into the mix, I've found myself spending more time talking about how different it would be to the old European Concert than the benefits of a new concert. Indeed, to operate, the new Asia Pacific system/machinery is going to look so different to Europe's Concert of Powers that the name issue gets in the way.

For a start, middle powers expect to have a large say in the emerging system; ASEAN wants to drive key parts of the mechanism. That is a long way from the European model where the big powers were great ones for redrawing maps and gobbling up the territory of weaker states. No wonder talk of a concert can make ASEAN shiver.

A concert is the aim. But the name cannot be the same.

Painting, of the Congress of Berlin in 1878 by Anton von Werner, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Rugby Union used to be known as the game they play in heaven. On the evidence displayed at the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, it is now best described as the game the play in nursing homes: inert, boring and disconcertingly close to death...In Rugby Union, the rules are structured for the benefit of referees.

Cop that tackle.

The two grand finals in Oz in Sydney and Melbourne at the weekend show that the old sectarian (Catholic-Protestant) divide may have faded but the differences over Rules and League still beat with religious passion in the far corners of the wide brown land. One of the many things separating Kevin Rudd from Julia Gillard is that they come from different sides of the divide. Gillard is passionate about Rules; Kevin is from Queensland so League was stamped on his birth certificate.

League was one common understanding between Rudd (QLD) and Howard (NSW). When Rudd shadowed Howard so effectively to snatch the prime ministership, he played the League game to State-of-Origin level: constant discipline, make every tackle, never drop the ball, occupy the minutes and the ground, then grind and grind. 

Gillard's political problem may be that she can't adopt her Oz Rules sensibilities to the structures she inherited from Howard and Rudd. She is not playing her natural game. This is a woman who took an Aussie Rules football to the White House and showed Obama how to handball. She just hasn't managed too many of those moments on home soil.

The usual understanding of the religious divide is that Rugby League holds sway in only two of the six states: Queensland and NSW. In fact, if a strange Cabinet debate in Canberra in the 1960s about Papua New Guinea becoming the seventh state had taken a dramatically different course, there'd be another rabidly League entity inside the Commonwealth.

So it was many moons ago that an Australian political leader of note, Andrew Peacock, was once mightily upstaged by a mere Oz journalist when flying around visiting the PNG provinces. 

Peacock flew into the Highlands and emerged to receive polite applause from the large crowd gathered to greet the Big Man from Canberra. Moments later, one of the accompanying journalists, the ABC's Sean Dorney, appeared at the door of the plane. At the cry of 'There's Sean!' the whole crowd erupted into ecstatic cheers and shouts of joy echoed across the tarmac.

Sean Dorney is a great correspondent, but he attained another status altogether in PNG because he played as the captain of the PNG Rugby League national team, the Kumuls. As Andrew Peacock later observed: never fly anywhere in PNG with Sean Dorney. It's one thing to be tormented by journos, but you don't want to be trumped by them!

Acknowledging the League-Rules divide in Australia and the place of League in PNG sets the scene for Kevin Rudd's football moment in Moreguina village in the Central Province of Papua New Guinea last Saturday. Here is a transcript of The Kevin addressing the village, with the added benefit of the call-and-response description of the crowd responses: 

Now my friends, which of you enjoys Rugby League? Everybody? Which of you has been watching the NRL back home? The great national tragedy in Australia is that my team, the Broncos, are not in the final. Do we have Broncos fans here? (Crowd yells yes). This is a very good village. So we’re going to have an NRL final with no Broncos – that is a bad thing. But given that we’ve got Manly and given we’ve got the [New Zealand] Warriors in the grand final, we’d better back Manly. Are any of you supporting the AFL? There’s a big game on in Australia as well. Who’s supporting Geelong? (Silence) Who’s supporting Collingwood? (Silence) I’m glad to see it’s a Rugby League village! 

While Kevin Rudd was at Moreguina, Julia Gillard was at the MCG in Melbourne cheering for Geelong. No wonder journalists keep writing about differences between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister.

Photo courtesy of the White House.

An unstated benefit of Parliamentary committee inquiries is to educate MPs; the stated benefit of a White Paper is to educate a government. In this, asking the right questions is a good start, and the White Paper has some beauties: 

• The current and likely future course of economic, political and strategic change in Asia, encompassing China, India, the key ASEAN countries as well as Japan and the Republic of Korea.
• The domestic economic and social opportunities and challenges of the Asian Century for Australia.
• Opportunities for a significant deepening of our engagement with Asia across the board, including in the economy, science and technology collaboration, clean energy, education, business-to-business and people-to-people links and culture.
• The political and strategic implications of the Asian Century for Australia.
• The role of effective economic and political regional and global cooperation.

Ken Henry's White Paper will be a companion document to another significant study being put together by two other Canberra wise owls, Allan Hawke and Ric Smith. Those two former secretaries of the Defence Department are overseeing a Review which will provide a 'strategic context' for Australia's next scheduled Defence White Paper in 2014. The agenda for the Review is all about moving more of Australia's military to the north and west of the continent and aligning Australia with the US military Posture Review.

Compare the questions posed to Henry with what Hawke and Smith have been asked to cover, noting the Defence brief is about the Asia Pacific, not the Asian Century:

• The rise of the Asia Pacific as a region of global strategic significance.
• The rise of the Indian Ocean rim as a region of global strategic significance.
• The growth of military power projection capabilities of countries in the Asia Pacific.
• The growing need for the provision of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief following extreme events in the Asia Pacific region.
• Energy security and security issues associated with expanding offshore resource exploitation in Australia’s North West and Northern approaches.

Not all parts of Canberra talk in exactly the same tongue. Treasury might be comfortable with the Asian Century, but Defence wants the Asia Pacific because it explicitly embraces the US.

In setting sail to the Henry White Paper, Julia Gillard delivered far and away the best foreign policy speech she has made as leader. Characteristically for Gillard, she will probably get little credit for the substance offered in her AsiaLink and Asia Society oration. By her now-infamous throwaway that foreign affairs is not her passion, Gillard surrendered one of the commanding assets of any prime minister. The foreign affairs stage is a bully pulpit which faces to a domestic audience as well as beyond the boundaries. 

Gillard has downgraded her own ability to educate Australians on the world they face (and education, she says, is her passion). For instance, the policy community has long grappled with the relative decline of Australia's economic weight compared to Asia, but leaders don't often put the figures directly and clearly to the voters. Gillard states the change (the decline) in detailed terms.

She put her own language, too, to the China-US conundrum when surveying what she called a vast landscape of change:

...much is written on the potential tensions inherent in our economic relationship with China and our Alliance ties. I'm a decision-maker, not a commentator, and I don't by nature reach for the jawbone or the megaphone. But I do say this: The Government's approach comprehends the challenges and risks. Certainly, these relationships will not manage themselves and we are far from complacent about them. But we are far from pessimistic too. Because there is nothing in our Alliance relationship with the United States which seeks to contain China, because a growing, successful China is in the interest of every country in the region, including our own and because our national strength, and that of our ally, is respected in the region and the world.

Mark that as a reasonable description of the Canberra conundrum. Over to Ken Henry to detail some answers.

Photo by Flickr user yuckbananas.

The horror of the first Bali bombing in 2002 caused many in Canberra to ponder where they had failed. Despite the 9/11 attacks and the foiled Jemaah Islamiyah plot for a series of bomb attacks in Singapore, Australian agencies had not really connected the dots and sounded the alarm. One or two of Canberra's mandarins gave public expression to that sense of failure; the politicians could not grapple with the topic in public.

The Howard Government scorched and scorned any suggestion of intelligence malfunction over Bali, while Labor — scarred and scared by the Terror-and-Tampa election — felt that any real political attack risked being seen as crassly opportunist, or merely playing to John Howard's security-policy strengths.

The politics remain sensitive, but big and small policy responses have flowed. The 2004 report by Philip Flood on the effectiveness of Australian intelligence set the seal on a huge surge of cash into the national security complex. Seldom has a sense of failure been so richly rewarded. The Foreign Affairs Department's fixation with travel warnings has its roots in the same place — and still bedevils relations with Indonesia.

The reverberations of the terrorist attacks in Bali and on the Australian embassy in Jakarta and the completely different challenge of people smugglers joined in one understanding in Canberra — Australia must ally itself with, not alienate, Southeast Asia. The regional understanding is usually present in the call-and-response/cat-call and calumny of Oz; the continuous conversation among pollies and people.

Thus, one of the few tin-ear moments from John Howard was when he tried to employ George W Bush's first term language of pre-emption in talking about Australian responses to terrorist threats coming from the region. It flamed in Southeast Asia and didn't really reverberate domestically. The demands of region meant that the lead instrument for action in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific was the Australian Federal Police; in Iraq and Afghanistan it was the Australian Defence Force.

A simple measure of the politics of all this is to chart how these diverse external pressures influenced Australian elections over the decade. In a simple win-lose equation, the Liberal-National Coalition is well ahead of Labor. In the 2001 election, John Howard joined his achievements in East Timor to the turmoil of Terror-and-Tampa to devastating electoral effect. In the 2004 election, the dangers posed by terrorism and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were still political assets for Howard; Mark Latham's pungent animosity towards George W Bush cost Labor because it translated electorally as being anti-alliance.

In 2007, Kevin Rudd matched Gough Whitlam's 1972 effort to become the only Labor leader to draw an election dividend from a war (Curtin delivered for Labor but the effort killed him; Billy Hughes triumphed but split Labor, then deserted the party). Rudd's strange achievement was to withdraw from one war (Iraq) yet re-commit to another (Afghanistan).

In the 2010 election, Labor and the Coalition affirmed their consensus on Afghanistan by hardly talking about it in the campaign. It was only the demands of a drawn election that forced Afghanistan onto the floor of the Parliament. Tony Abbott re-introduced the Tampa effect with a constant one-liner: 'stop the boats'. The voters rightly called it a draw.

Punditry allows for pop psychology, so what did the 9/11 decade do to the Oz psyche? The forces the decade unleashed offer part of the answer to the conundrum Michael Wesley points to in discussing the 'deep contradictions in contemporary Australia's attitudes towards the outside world' — a nation that has internationalised, yet a society that displays a 'deepening insularity'.

With Terror-and-Tampa at the start and global financial crisis at the end, Australians could be excused for deciding this was a time that warned them of the need to step back and turn inward. Watching the twin towers fall told Australians much about what they might fear in the new decade; the bomb blasts in Bali brought that horror close to home. The 88 Australians who died in the suicide attack in Kuta on 12 October were people who lived in the next suburb and looked like mates and girlfriends, our sons and daughters. The pains of the 9/11 decade reminded many Australians of the great fortune involved in being the only nation with its own continent.

One final thought on what 9/11 did to Canberra — it changed, probably forever, the immediate surrounds and approaches to all the major buildings in the Parliamentary triangle. The physical legacy of the decade is the plague of bollards posing as giant mushrooms and concrete barriers trying to look like walls — silent sentinels to stop any terrorist blast from getting too close to the key buildings of government.

Photo by Flickr user alistercoyne.

ASIO's budget has increased by 655%, the Australian Federal Police budget by 161%, ASIS by 236% and the Office of National Assessments by 441%. The legislative response has been unprecedented, too. Since 9/11, Federal Parliament has enacted more than 40 pieces of 'security legislation' which ensure that Australia has some of the most Draconian anti-terrorism laws in the Western world. In fact, it is the only Western liberal democracy that allows its domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, to detain persons for seven days without charge or trial and without reasonable suspicion that those detained are actually involved in any terrorist activity. This gigantic policy response has been at odds with the reality of the risk of terrorism in Australia. To date, not a single person has been killed in a terrorist attack on Australian soil in the post-9/11 era. About 100 Australians have died in terrorist attacks overseas, most of them in the Bali bombings. Indeed, chances of dying in a terrorist attack in Australia are close to zero.

If that 'close to zero' moment does happen in Australia, it seems certain it will be caused by Australians. That was another big shift over the decade. At the start, Canberra looked outward for the threat, to Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah. Now it looks inward at its own people. In a speech looking back at the 9/11 decade, the Attorney-General, Robert McLelland, said the focus is on the danger posed by Australians who become radicalised: 

Since 2000, there have been four major terrorist plots disrupted in Australia. To date, 38 individuals have been prosecuted as a result of counter-terrorism operations and 23 have been convicted. Significantly, 37 of the 38 people prosecuted are Australian citizens and 21 of the 38 were born in Australia.

Just as America needs to worry about how so much of its foreign relations is now run by its military, Australia needs to contemplate the way 'security' drives its decisions and policy options. Canberra's counter-terrorism edifice forms part of the national security complex that is seeking to consolidate after an extraordinary period of growth.

Those inside it prefer the term 'national security community', but the always-present elements of competition as well as cooperation mean that 'complex' is a more accurate description. The competition is inevitable because cash does not flow equally to all parts of the complex. The loser in Canberra's security decade was Foreign Affairs, as the Lowy Institute has charted in detail. Agencies like the Australian Defence Force, ASIO and the AFP thrived in the 9/11 decade while DFAT lagged.

Just to tilt that image a little, though, consider the point that one of major winners was not an obvious member of the security complex. Over the decade, the cash cascaded consistently into aid, and its custodian AusAID. The aid budget doubled in the 9/11 decade and will do it again this decade. The Howard Government put weak and failing states in the same frame as terrorism, and suddenly international aid looked like a good investment.

Photo of the new ASIO headquarters in Canberra courtesy of ASIO. ASIO is a corporate member of the Lowy Institute.

For the ADF, both Iraq and Afghanistan have had some similarities with Vietnam. The ADF has again served as a junior alliance partner with the operations of army units confined to one province. In Vietnam, the Australian Army judged that it had done its allotted task and won the war in its specific part of the country; the aim in Afghanistan now is the same.

The ADF avoided the great soul-searching that tore at the US military after Vietnam, and aims to again emerge with its professional pride intact after Iraq and Afghanistan. Such tough pragmatism will be needed as coalition forces in Afghanistan stretch towards the 2014 exit. Plus, the end of this extended bout of expeditionary warfare will not diminish the demands already evident from the other pressures on the ADF during the 9/11 decade.

The Australian Arc

Call it the Australia Arc rather than the Melanesian Arc of Instability. It's more polite and is explicit about the power that takes responsibility for stability in the region. Under various operational titles, the ADF has been deployed as a garrison force in East Timor since 1999. And RAMSI in Solomon Islands has been running since 2003. The ADF is on its 25th rotation in the Solomons.

Through the 9/11 decade, the neighbourhood kept reaching out to remind Canberra of this thought: 'Australia needs to worry a little less about the small problems it has with big wars, and address some of the big problems that it has with small wars.' That elegant opening thought from Mark O'Neill's Lowy Paper was echoed by the former chief of Army, Peter Leahy, who expressed Army's frustration that 'Australia's strategic policy community has been unduly focused on the least likely fight'.

The Asian century

For Australia's defence planners, the immediate realities of terror and war in the 9/11 decade have sat uncomfortably beside the need to focus on what an ever-more powerful and richer Asia will demand in the decades ahead. The duality at times has produced a strangely divided defence debate, where important parts of the subject often have little connection with each other.

This mental juggling act will be on display again at the AUSMIN talks in San Francisco this week. Asia is driving huge spending projects — new generation planes, doubling the submarine fleet —  along with another bout of 'go-north-go-west' soul seeking with the ADF Posture Review.

All these demands have kept up the cash flow. The ADF budget grew from $13.85 billion in 2001-2 to $26.5 billion this financial year. (Back in 2001-2 that was 1.8% of GDP; this year, ditto.) Money never buys happiness, of course. For an ADF being pulled and pushed by so many demands, getting the budget is only the start of the 'choices and chances' dilemma: get today's job done while thinking about tomorrow's task. 

Defence was mugged in the May budget because it couldn't actually spend the cash as quickly as planned on kit. That problem is part of the reason for the blizzard of reviews swirling around Defence at the moment. Still, there are worse headaches than having difficulty burning through your budget. As Greg Sheridan wrote on Saturday, Stephen Smith has been telling friends privately that being Defence Minister is just like being Foreign Minister: 'except that you have cash, capacity and assets.'

The cash and capacity is partly a reward for what the ADF has been doing through the 9/11 decade. What gets used, gets rewarded. In the same way, it has been the era of Australia's special forces — this is a small empire which is growing. Last week, for instance, responsibility for maintaining parachute capability was transferred from Army Forces Command to Special Operations Command. In an institution with the sense of tradition that is the Australian Army, that amounts to a revolution.

The SAS went into Afghanistan in 2001 and will probably be the last out, deep into this decade. If Australia does perform an overwatch role beyond 2014, that job will be done by special forces (which have also sustained half of Australia's casualty deaths in Afghanistan).

The 9/11 decade has been demanding and traumatic for those on the front line of the ADF. But conflict always opens up opportunities for an officer corps and both grows and changes the bureaucracy. That is why the civilian or public service side of Defence has just experienced a mould-breaking moment at the very top — a 30-year Army veteran who was the inaugural commander of the Special Operations Command has just become Secretary of the Defence Department.  

Next time, Canberra's 9/11 decade: the Public Service.

Photo courtesy of the Department of Defence.

 
At AUSMIN in Melbourne last November, the US and Australia agreed to spend the next 12 months looking at how America could make greater use of Australian facilities. Recent Stephen Smith speeches in Singapore and Washington have indicated that the deal is done and it will look like this:

• Increased US access to Australian training, exercise and test ranges.
• Prepositioning of US equipment in Australia.
• Allowing for greater US use of Australian facilities and ports.

Doing his last Asian tour as Defence Secretary in June, Robert Gates told the Shangri La Dialogue that America is seeking a defence posture across the Asia Pacific that is 'more geographically distributed, operationally resilient and politically sustainable – a posture that maintains our presence in Northeast Asia while enhancing our presence in Southeast Asia and into the Indian Ocean'.

More US weight in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean? Hello, Australia.

Gates said the US and Australia wanted to expand opportunities for the two militaries to train and operate together. The alliance would shift towards more combined defence activities and shared use of facilities, including 'increasing our combined naval presence and capabilities to respond more readily to humanitarian disasters; improving Indian Ocean facilities – a region of growing international importance; and expanding training exercises for amphibious and land operations, activities that could involve other partners in the region.'

All this effort has drawn Australia deeply into the US Global Force Posture Review; so much so, in fact, that in June, Smith announced Australia's own version, a Defence Force Posture Review. Two former Defence Secretaries, Allan Hawke and Ric Smith, are overseeing the Review, which will provide a 'strategic context' for Australia's next scheduled Defence White Paper in 2014. The agenda for the Review is all about moving more of Australia's military might to the north and west of the continent.

The domestic explanation for such a shift is to protect the energy infrastructure involved in vast oil and gas projects that are driving Australia's economic health. The regional purpose is to respond to the changing strategic dynamics in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia and to compliment what Canberra hopes will be an increased US presence. The Hawke-Smith Review was told to consider:

• The rise of the Asia Pacific as a region of global strategic significance.
• The rise of the Indian Ocean rim as a region of global strategic significance.
• The growth of military power projection capabilities of countries in the Asia Pacific.
• The growing need for the provision of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief following extreme events in the Asia Pacific region.
• Energy security and security issues associated with expanding offshore resource exploitation in Australia's north-west and northern approaches.

All that will give them plenty to talk about in San Francisco. Is that a panda in the room? And what about that faint smell of curry?

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

Menzies used the alliance as a wonderful political sword, thrusting it deep into the Labor Party. In its first decades, ANZUS helped keep Labor in permanent opposition. Part of the achievement of a series of Labor leaders – particularly Whitlam and Hawke – was to convince Labor to embrace the pragmatic heritage of one of the great odd-couple relationships of Australian history: between the neutralist-anti-conscriptionist who became a war-time leader, John Curtin, and that American Caesar, General Douglas MacArthur.

Not least in this pragmatic judgment was that Labor had to join the Australian people in loving the alliance. Hawke showed Labor how to embrace the treaty and turn it to electoral advantage, even as a New Zealand Labor took the NZ out of ANZUS. Whitlam, with Vietnam, and Rudd, with Iraq, demonstrated that Labor could maintain the alliance while quietly departing from a US war.

Both sides of Australian politics have acquired a deep understanding of the domestic worth of ANZUS. Whatever it means militarily, the alliance has maintained a remarkable potency in its impact on politics. This potency explains much about why Australia keeps volunteering for US wars – the blood price is regularly paid. The payment is a product of current opinion polls and the continuing tithe set by history.

The US promise of aid (well, 'consultation') if Australia is attacked is at the centre of the ANZUS document, but remote compared to some of the recurring and day-to-day benefits. Yet that ultimate promise has shaped Australia's choices in many ways. The wonks debate the worth of the extended nuclear deterrence offered by the US. But that US nuclear guarantee – along with international efforts at non-proliferation — set the terms of the equation that saw Australia walk away from the nuclear weapons ambitions that so interested John Gorton when he was prime minister.

The alliance is vital for the access it gives to US military technology – and the promise of resupply if the shooting ever starts. But an even greater prize is intelligence and surveillance. The beating heart of the alliance is at Pine Gap, the joint facility outside Alice Springs, with hundreds of American personnel (from the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency) working alongside Australians.  The new cyber battlefield adds another layer to this intimate and intricate techno-embrace that puts the alliance deep into the workings of Canberra.

Politically, militarily and diplomatically, the alliance offers access and, in theory, the chance to influence. It opens doors in Washington at the most senior levels. And that provides flow-on benefits for Australian actions and options in Asia.

For a document that has been so often and deeply analysed for meaning and nuance by Australians, the treaty is a quick and simple read. Article II promises 'continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid'. Article III does it all in one sentence: 'The Parties will consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific.' And Article IV is the pledge to meet the common danger posed by an attack on any of the parties.

The treaty is supposed to apply in the Pacific. But the only time has been formally invoked was by John Howard after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. A document written with Japan and Communism in mind has come a long way from its early, jelly stages.

The prediction Michael Wesley offers in his book on Australia and the rise of Asia is that 'the alliance will move from being a cornerstone of Australia's international politics to being a major supporting beam.' If that process took much of the next 60 years, it would suit the majority of the Australian populace and many in the polity.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.