Trumped part I: America's gimp

Australian foreign policy has changed profoundly in the past few weeks, more so than at any time since 1942 - but with the important difference that the current Commonwealth government seems at a loss for how to deal with it.

Our information about what was important to US voters, and how they might use that information to choose their President and Congress, was poor. The government has sources of information that go beyond the traditional media, such as an Ambassador who was a recent member of the Cabinet, and a golf course designer who has done business with the President-Elect. The rest of us, however, are left with this sinking feeling that we've all been had in assuming US voters would head off Trump, and this will get worse as media both deny any culpability and assert an exclusive and indefinite right to misinform us under the guise of reliable, factual, and relevant information.

First, let's go around the media and work out how Australia's relationship with the US and other countries is likely to be changed. Then, let's aim squarely at those Australian media dipsticks trying to crawl from the wreckage of their credibility, and remind them of the conditions under which they are to go forward, if at all. Finally, I want to explore the media's obsession with this idea of the "alt-right", while at the same time failing to examine the idea in any depth.

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Since US troops were first committed to the battlefields of World War I in 1918, Australians have fought beside them. In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and other operations besides, Australia has joined US combat aims and suffered losses of blood and treasure. This relationship has shaped the foreign policy behaviour of both countries.

In Australia, it has bred a political monoculture across the governing parties that the US is the guarantor of Australia's political and economic success (and that of other countries, such as Japan or the Philippines) in the Asia-Pacific region. This is supported by a range of institutions, such as the Australia-America Leadership Dialogue or Fulbright Scholarships, which reinforce this relationship. Australians seeking a career in foreign policy, whether partisan (by becoming a member of a political party) or not (by eschewing party politics and following a career in academia or diplomacy), looked to US foreign policy as the star by which all vessels steered.

There is no way of regarding Australia's relationship with the US as anything other than closely intertwined with the broader aims of US foreign policy: outlooks and proposals that might have seen Australia break with the US altogether, or diminished the relationship (e.g. by closing Pine Gap or banning nuclear warship visits) were cast to the fringes of Australian politics and not entertained by serious careerist pragmatic people.

In the US, we have seen a bifurcation between official rhetoric warmly praising our alliance and a sub rosa commentary taking Australian support for granted, verging on contempt. "We think you're an easy lay", recalled Jack Waterford in outlining occasional Australian disagreements within a generally close relationship.

Yesterday we saw the Prime Minister admit that he tried and failed to secure a meeting with Trump, along the lines of Trump's meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Abe. One missed meeting need not have much long-term significance - but it hints at something more foreboding for the relationship, certainly as far as Australia's political monoculture is concerned.

Donald Trump's method of campaigning collapsed the difference between official high-sounding rhetoric and sub rosa contempt in almost every area of policy. While other conservatives were happy to mouth platitudes about freedom and equality while courting bigots through 'dog whistling', Trump was openly racist, sexist, and dismissive of people with disabilities - including veterans. Let's not pretend Trump is different to what he is. Let's have no truck with the fatuous media make-work scheme that is 'the walkback', and apply this pattern - seen throughout this campaign and beforehand - to US-Australian relations into the foreseeable future.

Trump will be openly dismissive of the Turnbull government and of Australia. Trump will openly state that Australia needs the US more than the reverse, and will make demands not even the most craven Washington-phile Australian could support, or even entertain. He and his Administration will be dismissive of the women who are Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Defence in this government, and of their shadows. Political opponents of the current government will titter at this new scope of failure, but the sheer effrontery will transcend partisanship and go to the regard in which our nation is held.

Nothing transforms a relationship (any sort of relationship) like stripping back the honeyed words and seeing it for what it is. It will be a massive break from the norms of the Australia-US alliance.

US Presidents have hung Australian PMs out to dry from time to time, as collateral damage for broader geostrategic reasons. In 1956, President Eisenhower refused PM Menzies' request to intervene in the Suez Canal crisis because of the US's wider interests in western Asia at the time. In 1972, PM McMahon condemned his political opponent Gough Whitlam for visiting and recognising the People's Republic of China - unaware President Nixon was about to do so, again playing a wider game.

Trump will wrongfoot Turnbull. He will do the same to any other putative Australian PM you might name. This is how the man does deals.

The best way to catch Trump out will be to catch him when he's distracted, as we've seen from his hasty and inadequate settlement of Trump University lawsuits. The current government may well be canny enough to do this - or not.

In his address to the Australian parliament in 2011, President Obama said that the US would be less inclined to unilaterally enforce international rules and norms and called upon allies in the region to do more to support shared aims, and expected allies to step up and share more of the burden. Australia is building warships at a rate never seen before because the US has indicated that it's in our best interest to do so.

Some commentators noted Trump's remarks along similar lines of making allies shoulder more of the military burden that had fallen to the US, and compared his approach to mafia shakedowns - but he was, in his crude way, aligning with bipartisan US policy. None of the Republican candidates Trump defeated in the primaries, certainly not Hillary Clinton and still less Bernie Sanders, were arguing for a Pax Americana where a rules-based global system is set up and enforced by the US military commanded by its President.

Criticism of Trump's rhetoric on this issue is just hype, snobbery, and bullshit: the central flaws of all his opponents' unsuccessful campaigns.

This isn't to normalise Trump. It's to do what the Australian media should have done, but failed to do: take his record and project it forward onto how a Trump administration might treat Australia within its view of the world. Australian journalists observing US politics, whether from Australia or on assignment in the US, tend to avoid original sources of information: they read The New York Times and The Washington Post and other established media outlets, not realising the audience in Australia for US politics can and does access those same sites - and more.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation covered the US election by sending reporters to Washington and having them relay banalities from CNN and Politico, which they could have done from Ultimo or Canberra. Shipping those people all that way gave no additional insight at all (except that ABC News thinks their audience are mugs, and should stop gibbering about resource constraints).

Most of the reasons why this deeply weird man was elected have nothing to do with us. The political class in Australia will hunker down and wait for him to pass, assuming the Democrats can and will come up with a candidate in 2020 that can beat Trump. The hunkering down will mean Australia both misses real opportunities in Trump-led US, and underestimates benefits awaiting us after he goes. They will underestimate the extent to which Trump has and will change the landscape, rendering "back to normal" impossible: there is no normal, there is no back.

Our leaders will not, however, do the hard but necessary work of rethinking the Australia-US relationship from first principles. The information isn't available; the very act of doing so is way outside our Overton Window.

Foreign policy wonks have said for a long time that we are moving from a world where the US calls the shots to a multipolar world, where other powers (e.g. Russia, China, India - maybe the EU if they can hold it together) play an important but not final role, along with the US playing a similar, diminished role. The trick, as they saw it, was to manage the transition peacefully. Part of this managerial assumption was that the people of the US would go along peaceably with their country's diminished role, diminished expectations thing. What else are they wrong about?

Australia will have to operate across a much broader front than they have; there will be fewer (expected, positive) options from Washington and more options from Beijing, Jakarta, Delhi, Lima, Nairobi, Berlin, etc. Politicians can't do this. Big corporates can't do this. "Pragmatic people" will blame everyone but themselves. There will be opportunities through sport or other means that are not directly linked to politics or trade, but which will open opportunities in those areas, which Australian politicians and corporates will miss and whinge about when their passing becomes clear. You won't need an app to disrupt foreign policy. Australians are heading into a time of missed opportunities. Coal and hobbled broadband will hold us back. Traditional media will barely notice.

For all its longueurs and ponderousness, foreign policy moves quickly when needs must. In 1910 Britain was indisputably the world's mightiest power: ten years later it was a whimpering basket-case of debt and pain, and Australian foreign policy (such as it was) didn't cope well then either. In 1941 John Curtin reached out to the USSR as the pre-eminent military power of the time; ten years later Australia's postwar consensus had hardened against the Soviets and the government sought to ban the Communist Party. We are again in such a moment of transition.

Nobody has any grounds for believing that our current ministers or their shadows have what it takes to set the nation on a new course in terms of foreign policy, defence, trade, or anything else involving the US; only hacks will pretend, only fools will believe them.

Handy Andy

The selection of Andrew Hastie as the Liberal candidate for Canning is a nice summary of all that was wrong with the Abbott government (and yes, the choice of past tense is deliberate).

Due process

There was a time when no self-respecting political party would touch a candidate who was still under investigation for serious matters on the field of battle. The report of this investigation may well exonerate Hastie, or it may not; in an era with greater respect for the armed forces and its due processes, Hastie would have been forced to wait until all such investigations were concluded.

It was inappropriate for Hastie to refer to these matters as having been concluded; had he done so before his resignation from the Army, such comments would have been insubordinate.

Under the Abbott government, there has been scant regard for due process. Where the government has been apprehensive about its chances of success in legal proceedings, such as in its treatment of asylum-seekers or granting of mining leases, the government has framed its opponents in alarmist terms ("vigilantes", "terrorists") and changed the law to exclude their right to even bring an action against the government. While one arm of the government (the investigative processes within the ADF) regards Hastie and those under his command as a subject of investigation, another (Abbott's office, and potentially the legislature) ignores the very possibility that he might yet have a case to answer.

If I were a standard Canberra pundit, I might wryly opine that Hastie's candidacy is "brave". I think it's typical of this government to ride roughshod over respect for procedure and legal niceties whenever they feel like it.

Government information-gathering above all other considerations

The ADF investigation, as David Wroe points out, centres on whether or not Australian soldiers breached the rules of war by removing the hands of Taliban fighters for the purposes of identification after the battle.

On the battlefield, mutilating bodies would surely decrease the prospect of civilian co-operation at best, at worst fuel anti-Western hatred and spur more and worse attacks upon Australian troops. Again, though, this is a matter for military and/or scholarly inquiries.

I will not get squeamish or moralistic about what soldiers do in battle. It is fair to say, however, that it is typical of this government to prioritise its information-gathering requirements over any and all other considerations.

The finest minds in the government couldn't define metadata, but they still want to monitor it. It spies on its political opponents, whether you want to talk about Senator Faulkner allegedly receiving leaks or Senator Hanson-Young allegedly being spied upon. This government (and successive major-party governments in recent years - only in the supposedly chaotic parliament of 2010-13 did it abate) has decreased privacy considerations in its information-gathering to the point where any remaining privacy provisions stand like burnt-out, gutted buildings, relics of a past that has not quite gone but which might impede 'progress' from time to time.

Hastie may have acted under orders in gathering such information as he and his troops gathered. Information gathered by such grisly means may well have some value. The idea that such information-gathering drowns out all other considerations is not quite an epitaph for this government, but it's definitely part of its legacy.

Women

... I ask myself: why isn’t our party selecting more women members of parliament?

Why isn’t our party, as relatively advanced on this today as we were 70 years ago?

Why haven’t we remained ahead of our time in promoting women; and is that one of the reasons why we no longer attract the majority of women voters?

... there is consistently low female representation across our party.

There are relatively few women in leadership positions in the lay party [sic]; there are relatively few women in the parliament; and because there are relatively few women in the parliament it’s harder to get more women into the cabinet.

- Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Address to [Liberal Party] Federal Women's Committee Luncheon, Adelaide, 15 August 2015

I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man [Abbott] ... If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.

- Prime Minister Julia Gillard, address to the House of Representatives, Canberra, 9 October 2012

Abbott could have insisted that the vacancy in Canning be filled by a woman. He could have prevailed upon women of substance like Diane Smith-Gander or Deirdre Willmott, or even Tess Randall, to stand - and prevailed on WA Liberal powerbrokers like Julie Bishop and Matthias Cormann to make it happen. This wouldn't have meant there was a quota - perish the thought! - but a successful political operation would have made it happen under the circumstances, some work of noble note may yet be done, etc etc.

Georgina Dent found Abbott's speech "astonishing":

Not, sadly, due to its astute revelations or bold leadership, rather it is its complete and curious absence of substance, critical analysis and deductive reasoning that makes it shocking.

Pretty much all of Tony Abbott's speeches are like that. A dull-witted survey of the landscape, followed by some cliched remarks that might have passed for considered thought in some bygone century, all summed up in a way that must be what it's like to suffer from incontinence: an awareness that you're in an unpleasant position made worse by the shame at having brought it upon yourself, and the inadequacy of all other options (including blame) to get you out of the predicament.

Dent has probably been lucky in not subjecting herself to regular doses of Abbott's speeches. Press gallery journalists also express surprise at how bad his speeches are; unlike Dent they've endured those speeches for decades, so one can only conclude such people are the worst thing any journalist can be - obtuse.

Hastie cannot be blamed for not being a woman, a shortcoming all too common. I hope it is not grossly sexist of me to observe that Hastie will prove more indicative (if not quite representative) of this government than many women who have been active members of it.

Conservatives and the military

Modern politics calls for major-party candidates who do as they're told, don't speak out of turn, and don't hog the limelight. Members of the ADF have those qualities in spades.

I never felt Labor had our backs when I was serving [in the Army].

- Andrew Hastie, yesterday

Members of the ADF vote for the conservative parties more than any other occupational group - more than lawyers, or farmers, or corporate executives. It comes as no surprise that such people would also join those parties, run for preselection and secure public office.

The defence force serves the nation, regardless of who may be governing it at any given moment. Yet, conservative politics in this country has always claimed to be more supportive of the military than Labor:

• Billy Hughes split the ALP over conscription in World War I;
• Labor had pacifist and anti-Imperialist elements among its membership since the party's inception, which increased after the slaughter of World War I;
• Labor criticised what little the Lyons government did to upgrade Australia's military in the 1930s;
• John Curtin had been a pacifist in World War I, and conservatives used this against him becoming Prime Minister during World War II. The disastrous decision to send Australian troops to Singapore was considered by many historians to be a reaction to conservative criticism, not only from within Australia but from Churchill in the besieged UK;
• Following rhetoric from the Nixon Administration in the US, conservatives conflated protests against the Vietnam war with pacifism and antipathy to troops, and criticised the Whitlam government for withdrawing Australian troops from South Vietnam;
• In 2003, then-Labor leader Simon Crean opposed sending Australian troops to Iraq, but declared his support for the troops nonetheless to the derision of the gung-ho Howard government.

All of the above points (and others like them) have been painstakingly rebutted by historians. I do not aim to lend them credibility they don't have, but rather to show Hastie's remark is not some unprecedented departure from the ADF's non-partisan service to the nation. Hastie draws upon a consistent rhetorical tradition in Australia's conservative politics.

Poor pay and conditions for ADF personnel, and inadequate support for wounded veterans, are yet more of those bipartisan traditions that our press gallery and defence/foreign policy intelligentsia insist upon but which fail us over and over again. You can expect that Andrew Hastie, whether as an MP or an advisor, will achieve no more for serving personnel and veterans than anyone else has in the past fifty years.

The kiss of death

He'll wrap you in his arms,
tell you that you've been a good boy
He'll rekindle all the dreams
it took you a lifetime to destroy
He'll reach deep into the hole,
heal your shrinking soul,
but there won't be a single thing that you can do
He's a god, he's a man,
he's a ghost, he's a guru
They're whispering his name
through this disappearing land ...

- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Red right hand

At their press conference in Canning Abbott praised Hastie - but he would, wouldn't he, blunting the news value in witnessing and recording such a statement. Pretty much everyone Abbott has praised effusively has come a-gutser in recent times, and the people of Canning are entitled to take his endorsement with a grain of salt. The Liberal Party can't go on with a leader whose very presence is a kiss of death; we saw in that Abbott-Napthine picture a serpentine Abbott seeming to drain Napthine's very marrow, negating their words or what the prospect of federal and state governments acting within the same party might hope to achieve.

Tony Abbott is a loser. It is entirely likely that Andrew Hastie will not become the next Member for Canning, and that the Liberals will use this as the excuse they need to dump Tony Abbott - but I've said that already. What about Hastie? He can't go back to the ADF, he's shirtfronted his superiors with his dopey comments pre-empting a long-running investigation, and if there's a Labor government he will end up with all the difficult, boring, no-credit jobs until he retires. The Liberals won't look after him - he has no deep roots in the WA Liberals, and being associated with Abbott isn't the golden ticket it might once have been. Who will look out for him?

Even if Hastie wins the byelection, he won't have enough time to cement himself in place before the next election. At the press conference we saw his umbrage at being questioned by journalists. Some random on the street will lead him a merry dance.

If Abbott goes plenty of staff will go with him too, as the Pharaohs were entombed with their most loyal retainers. There may be a vacancy for Hastie, particularly if the next Prime Minister fails to stem perceptions that this government is on the way out. He would be foolish to count too much on their good graces.

Hastie is flying without a net all right, and unemployment in WA is going up enough as it is without him (potentially) adding to it: think about the skills he has, in a market where demand for them won't be what it was.

Balance

But never mind an actual candidate being actually representative of the actual government. Some guy who hogged the obscurity he should have rightfully shared with Tony Abbott, and who has been politically inert for a decade (yet highly regarded by a dying broadcast medium) was rude to literate Melburnians. The incumbents fall to a resurgent opposition. Life goes on.

The Commission of Magical Thinking

Auditors, it is cruelly said, are people who lack the wit and verve to become accountants. They tend to be so focused on what's there that they tend to resist speculation, or be incapable of it. I wondered why there was so much hoo-ha over the Commission of Audit and why it took so long to report, and for once sympathised with the intrepid sleuths of the press gallery in not pushing for its report to be released.

I was surprised when the document appeared to be a veritable festival of speculation - this government's answer to Rudd's 2020 Summit. Perhaps I shouldn't have been: for a start, the Commission contained no taupe-souled auditors, another Abbott Government disconnect between what it says on the box versus what's in it.

Secondly, for a document that would foist so many additional responsibilities upon the states, it contains nobody who had actually run a state government (and who would they pick anyway? Nick Greiner was unwell, Jeff Kennett would have tipped people off to cuts cuts cuts, Ted Baillieu or John Olsen or Rob Borbidge would've just sat there, Richard Court has disappeared comprehensively from public life - John Fahey would have been ideal, and even Gary Humphries could have used the extra work. Oh well).

Press gallery reporting on federal-state relations is stuck in the Keating frame about Premiers and a bucket of money, but in reality the disconnect between those responsible for raising money and those responsible for spending it is one of the key dysfunctions in our political system. The Commission was right to raise the issue but their suggestions are inadequate and so is this government. I live in NSW, the state with the best educational, police, and health services; I'm all right Jack, but I pity those of my compatriots who are far from being my neighbours. Queensland and WA are the fastest-growing states and neither has a AAA rating; if the government of either or both started borrowing to fund infrastructure, Hockey for all his rhetoric would have conniptions. The Commission talked about offering states a parallel income tax, a 1930s idea last heard of under the Fraser government.

Privatising Australia Post is a joke. This government doesn't have the vision to turn it into the logistics behemoth that Deutsche Post has made of DHL, so it busies itself with petty defensive bullshit like this. This government would sell it to a friendly outfit who'd invest no money in it, run it into the ground, and then hire some ex-staffer to lobby for more tax breaks and handouts because they can't make a go of it. This is not a proposal from people who understand government and business, but the opposite.

So too, the proposal to benchmark ABC and SBS against the broken TV networks: fancy having lived in Australia as long as that lot have and confusing national broadcasters with commercials.

The proposal to have university students pay for a greater proportion of their degree isn't well thought out and seems designed to align with the Kemp-Norton review of higher education rather than any sort of honest examination in its own right.

When I left school in the 1980s the smart, diligent kids studied medicine and law. There was serious money to be made for graduates with those qualifications. With the introduction of HECS at the time, paying back education costs as a return on investment seemed fair. Now, graduates in both those fields are in oversupply, and no other field of study has taken their place (with the possible exception of public sporting academies designed to generate high-earning athletes, and even there a small proportion of graduates are covered).

This deflation of education cost-to-earnings has animated debate in the US but Kemp and Norton have largely missed it with magical thinking about the market, and the Commission was wrong to even comment in an area it clearly hadn't examined (concern about duplication, perhaps? Why not just leave it alone?). Countries that invest in education reap economic growth and prosperity; countries that leave those choices to individuals do not enjoy similar benefits. It's a real pity that the commission missed that.

The same applies to the 2% of GDP pledge for Defence, an oft-repeated statistic that has all the hallmarks of being plucked out of the air - especially when couple with calls for a White Paper, which presumably would test this very proposition, and followed by the questionable overinvestment in the F-35. Auditors would have picked up on the idea that investments in diplomacy and soft power would be better investments than this or that hardware.

Means-testing family homes for pensions is very much not a winner. There is a shortage of housing stock, let alone for older people who'd be looking to buy suitable premises once they had been forced to sell their existing homes. Talk about social disruption and ... no, this government simply won't do it. Same with competition for pharmacies, I mean what sort of country do you think we're running here.

The reason why you know this government is not committed to the NDIS/DisabilityCare is because they think it's a charity rather than a economically rational rights-based system, which is why there's all this rhetoric about "trials" and pushing out timelines and "genuine concern", etc. This will go before PPL does.

PPL is bollocks policy, but it is a talisman for whether or not you can trust Tony Abbott. If he junks PPL he will not be believed about anything, if he waters it down he will get no credit for it, and if it goes ahead it will be an albatross around his neck. Remember in 2007 how conventional wisdom held that Howard would be re-elected by people grateful for tax cuts?

There was a genuine conversation to be had about the age at which the pension kicks in. Rudd sprang the age increase to 67 as a surprise, reinforcing his reputation as a credibility-free stuntman. Abbott and Hockey have essentially done the same thing. They could have kicked this issue into the second term, consulting with older people and made the case for gradual increases to pensionable age (and enforced this on the parliamentary pension schemes), as though they planned on a long-term, substantial reform program. If Hockey were the better man and politician than Abbott, he would have taken that initiative, as Keating did with Hawke (who knew a thing or two about consultation). Instead, they've put the wind up people, the opposite of all that no-surprises stuff they promised.

If you're going to deregulate wages so that they go down, and cut benefits to low-income earners, it makes sense that such people would go to areas where housing and other living costs were lower. Yet, you show me a low-cost area of Australia and I'll show you an area of high unemployment. By mandating that low-income people be restricted from high-unemployment areas, Shepherd and his gang simply haven't thought things through and there is scant hope for Abbott in this respect.

These guys who govern us are not the guys to talk about 'sacrifice': not at the Budget, not on Anzac Day, not ever. Someone who claims every 'entitlement' is not the person to end entitlements. Any sharing of sacrifice will not follow through into a sharing of spoils when we come to the sunlit uplands. To share with someone, you'd want to spend time with them; and nobody wants to linger when Abbott's around.

The other place where their imagination genuinely came a-gutser was on the revenue side. It occurred to none of these giants that there was any alternative to taxing either business or incomes, and given that limitation jacking up income taxes was the only option. With miners and financiers making super profits off government guarantees, you'd think they would have been good for a bit of relief on spending cuts and direct taxation - but no, sadly.

This is a government that has outsourced its thinking about what sort of country we would want Australia to be, and how best to realise that - which is the best part of politics. It would have embarrassed itself by appointing the IPA to this Commission, but did the next best thing by lining up a range of exhausted volcanoes. The last government did something similar, but it took a grim pride in Getting Things Done which this government talks about, but doesn't really share. Whitlam and Gillard passed a flurry of legislation, while for Abbott even scrapping regulation was as half-hearted as the passing of it.

This government saw the books before the election - it only "inherited a mess" by realising how the policy vacuum they created for themselves is holding them back. They were careful to frame the Commission's terms of reference in such a way that reflected it back onto the government, and they succeeded: The Commission is a stale joke, and so is this government. Abbott and Hockey seriously believe they will get credit for not going as far as the Commission want them to, while the IPA and BCA will bag them as wimps over the smallest omission. Nobody will believe their protestations that they would never do some unpopular thing spelled out by the Commission; Abbott is nowhere so awkward as in the middle ground.

They will be flat out getting any of their big-ticket items through and it will be fascinating to see which ministers can make the best of the limited scope and time ahead of them. That double-dissolution isn't much of a threat these days, and neither is Tony Abbott.

Scott Morrison should be sacked

... but he won't be, and that's why the Abbott government is pretty much done for.

It is not OK to conduct military incursions into other countries' territories. It has never been OK. Morrison promised never to comment on operational matters, but he had to comment on these 'repeated incursions' before the full details came from Indonesia, or from some source other than his own mouth.

All the PR smarties tell you that if you have bad news, get it out early and get it out yourself. Some news, however, goes beyond mere 'bad news' or even a misunderstanding. Military incursions into other countries' territories is in this category.

The other category error that Morrison made was to blame the Navy, as though it blundered into Indonesian waters:

It was brought to my attention at just after 4.00pm Wednesday that Border Protection Command assets had, in the conduct of maritime operations associated with Operation Sovereign Borders, inadvertently entered Indonesian territorial waters on several occasions, in breach of Australian Government policy.

I should stress that this occurred unintentionally and without knowledge or sanction by the Australian Government.

It strains credibility that the Navy veered off course and did not realise its vessels were in Indonesian waters. The Navy sent its vessels where government told them to go, and did what government told them to do. It is not OK to blame the military for government policy blunders, and ultimately such a tactic will work against the government rather than the military.

From now on people in the military are more likely to leak against this government. People in the military are more likely to have credibility that politicians lack. Any difference of opinion between a politician and the military will be resolved in favour of the military (with the possible exception of bullying allegations). When you consider that military personnel vote Coalition more than any other occupational grouping, this is a political own-goal as well as a governmental one.

Australia needs a long-term relationship with Indonesia more than it needs this or that lot of politicians in government. That relationship will change as Indonesia grows in economic and political power. A big part of Australia's economic growth prospects lie in our increasing engagement with Indonesia. This government has no capacity for improving relations with Indonesia. Even after this government loses office, the silly-buggers of the past four months will be hard to live down.

Almost every Prime Minister in Australia's history has been confronted with the prospect of politicising the military. On almost every occasion, they have flinched and backed down from doing that; indeed, the Coalition went too far in not standing up for service personnel returning from Vietnam and giving them fewer benefits than returnees from World War II got from the cash-strapped Chifley and Menzies governments.

Veterans from Afghanistan will get fewer benefits still, and naval personnel injured at sea while intercepting boats will get less than that. This is worth remembering when watching Abbott and his ministers proclaim themselves strong supporters of the military, and when the press gallery simply pass on words and images to that effect without comment or qualification.

If Howard had been Prime Minister, he would now be in Jakarta apologising, particularly to Mrs Yudhuyono. His smarter advisors would be casting around for someone with the same credentials with Indonesia that Dr Marty Natalegawa (PhD, ANU) and Dewi Fortuna Anwar (MA, Monash) have with this country. He would realise that a strong relationship with Indonesia is important and that anyone who had to go to maintain that would go.

Peter Reith lied about the military to advance the political prospects of the then government, and his own career. He left politics abruptly, suggesting that Howard basically lost confidence in him. Today, in the emerging Fairfax tradition of commissioning jowl-wobbling outrage from grumpy old farts as clickbait, he can make catty remarks about the Liberal Party presidency but he has little to offer (either from his own mouth or as an example) about how an elected government can and should relate to the country's armed forces as part of governing. Always be suspicious when a media tart goes to ground.

Peter Reith was once regarded by inside-Canberra sages as a potential future leader (while Reith has gone, many of said sages are still there). Senator Ian Campbell was pretty highly regarded when Howard sacked him for, um, whatever he sacked him for. David Jull was highly regarded within the Australian tourism industry, as Morrison was. None of the inside-Canberra reasons why Morrison is Too Big To Sack stand up.

The Liberal Party is organised around strong leaders; Labor has institutional checks and balances, but the Liberals are all about the Fuehrerprinzip. The Nationals can get a look-in when they bring quality to the table, as they did in the '70s with Peter Nixon and Ian Sinclair, but mostly they are passengers in a Coalition government.

Abbott is a weak Prime Minister: weak on ideas, weak on execution, weak on resolving conflict, weak on insisting that his team deliver more and better. The fact that he talks slowly is almost beside the point because his words seem to carry no weight. Because the press gallery are mugs, they agreed that his strutting around and declarative statements would make him a strong leader, and they are puzzled that the evidence before them contradicts their convictions. By this point in her Prime Ministership, Julia Gillard was pretty much written off by the press gallery.

What, then, should Abbott do?

Abbott isn't going to get rid of himself, though perhaps he should. When he was in South Africa, the big decisions on Holden and Graincorp were taken in his absence. He can commentate on the cricket, but not apparently on incursions into Indonesian waters. When the big decisions have to be taken, he's not exactly stamping his authority and nor is he conferring to find workable solutions. He's a passenger in his own government, not the pilot or even the navigator.

Getting rid of Bishop would be too hard. She would become a lightning rod for everyone who has their doubts about Abbott. We could end up with an unmarried woman who was a former law-firm partner in the Lodge with her male partner, and my goodness we can't have that.

Getting rid of "three star" General Angus Campbell would be too soft. Campbell was always human window-dressing and nothing would be achieved in scapegoating him, except to antagonise the armed forces still further.

Abbott hasn't thought through the implications of appointing Peter Cosgrove as Governor-General for our relationship with Indonesia. After hyping Cosgrove so much Abbott can't afford not to appoint him, as appointing anyone else would look like a slap in the face to a man widely admired in this country.

Getting rid of Morrison would be just right. The longer Morrison stays in office, the clearer it is that Abbott is not really sorry for the incursions, and that the whole policy of patronising Indonesia like we do Vanuatu or New Zealand will continue. Within the Liberal Party, nobody trusts Morrison: the right hate him because they regard him as a smarmy, self-promoting turd, while their opponents on the lesser right know him to be a smarmy, self-promoting turd. Right now he's doing nothing to turn around dicey polling numbers, but if he backs down altogether and starts weeping for the wretched cast upon the waters he is gone.

Like Kevin Rudd on 'the greatest moral challenge of our time', Morrison is finished no matter what he does. He isn't big enough to reinvent himself and spring clear of this current imbroglio, which is why he can't really 'resign' in any meaningful sense. He's just treading water and getting away with it. If you're the head of this government and you don't want the whole government to be similarly stuck, then you have no choice but to cut him loose and reframe the debate.

Mind you, Tony Abbott isn't one for public debate. He's never seen any good thing arise from public debate. Since he was at university, Tony Abbott aligned himself with powerful people and articulated their interests. The Catholic church and the monarchy are not democratic institutions, and neither is the Liberal Party in any real sense. As long as he's in with the decision-makers, he's happy to let what he regards as idle chit-chat run and run - but when the impressions of this government are so fluid and when simple declarative statements are contradicted by observable facts, he runs the risk that his own statements will be regarded as just more idle chit-chat, rather than the desired effect of Shut Up And Listen This Is Your Prime Minister Speaking.

It would be surprising, but not beyond the realms of possibility, for the Commission of Audit to decide that onshore processing is more cost-effective than Nauru or Manus Island. In the same way that only Richard Nixon could go to "Red China" without being red-baited by Richard Nixon, Tony Abbott could come to welcome boat-borne refugees without any of your "pick up the phone!" nonsense - but then, for the first time in his life, he would have to run a positive campaign and become a bigger person than he is. If you still believe that's possible, read this. Fat chance - not even with the considerable power of the office that he currently occupies.

An economist at sea

Christopher Joye is an outstanding economic commentator. His pieces for The Australian Financial Review on economics reveal deep understanding and broad reading on economic matters, like this one; he's not afraid to irritate those who need to be irritated. His writing is generally courteous to the point of being old-fashioned. His pieces on matters other than economics are, unfortunately, not of the same standard - and worse, they are becoming increasingly frequent.

Take this piece for example. It's stupid. It looks sensational and got a lot of attention on Twitter, particularly from people who like Joye's economics stuff and who assume - wrongly - that he can turn his hand to reporting any old thing. A closer reading reveals Joye basically interviewed one superannuated rear-admiral and simply transcribed what he said, Latika Bourke-style, without really thinking about it but padding out the word-count.

Joye got this story, drilling into the inner reserve of substantive thought on the part of the Coalition, through his connections with the Coalition. His parents were mates with Malcolm Turnbull and Joye recently wrote a puff-piece on Hockey that make him seem safe to a bunch of people every bit as paranoid about the media as the government.

It would be stupid for the Royal Australian Navy to adopt nuclear submarines. It's not even a new idea. Joye has no excuse to take this crap on face value.

He's an economist. Building a nuclear enrichment and processing capability for military purposes would take vast amounts of money and considerable amounts of human resources at all levels of skill and training; more than are available at present to a short-staffed navy either as crew or on-shore maintenance.

He's a resident of Sydney's eastern suburbs. Not even the sort of government led by Abbott, careening between the inadequate and the insane, would install nuclear maintenance facilities at Garden Island (which is in the eastern suburbs) or at the submarine base at HMAS Platypus (which is just across the harbour from the eastern suburbs, in Hockey's electorate) Stirling, in Perth. There would have to be a new nuclear submarine facility set up somewhere far from Sydney Harbour or Perth - but not so far that it would be taken out by a first strike like northern Australian port cities were by the Japanese in 1942, or so unpleasant that nobody but pusser die-hards would want to work there.

He shouldn't have to wait for the Premier of South Australia, of all people, to put out a press release to examine the sorts of issues raised in this.

And so it falls to me, a blogger with meagre qualifications in history and IT, to do the economic analysis work on this proposal that Joye (a professional, highly-regarded economist with a PhD in economics) has neglected to do:

• First, the next government is going to spend billions of dollars building and securing military nuclear facilities; and then
• Secondly, they are going to recruit, train and equip a workforce to operate these bad boys; and
• Thirdly, junk their whole cautious budget approach (fewer tax receipts and additional spending commitments notwithstanding), because the whole country will appreciate this bit of infrastructure just as much as some old rear-admiral does; and
  
• The Treasurer who will do this will be the one whose constituents (and indeed whose family) live not far from the sub base; and finally
• Only if we write off the enormous start-up costs and wildly underestimate operating costs will nuclear-powered submarines make any sort of economic sense.

Yeah, that will work. Put it out there Chris, the punters will love that. The very sort of thing to send AFR circulation and credibility skyrocketing. We can bash Gillard for failing to implement a not-very-good idea from fifty years ago, because that's how we make the Fin relevant in today's competitive market.

There are a whole lot of concerns about nuclear proliferation here too - but I don't care about those, Joye and the people he quotes don't either, and there is no evidence that the government or opposition do. Still, maybe there's a story in it, maybe not.

I can understand Joye being taken in by a retired rear-admiral, and lacking the skill to question him on military matters (in his time as a journalist, Turnbull would have done a bit of a swot and would have been less afraid to put tough questions to the old man). I cannot understand Joye suspending his economic judgment over whether such a proposal was even a good idea. This is how smart people make dumb decisions, not only Joye but his misled readers.

Privately, some defence ministers in Asia support Australia obtaining nuclear-powered submarines because of mounting tensions with China, which has territorial disputes with India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, sources said ...

“Australia would be much better served with nuclear rather than conventional submarines based on our strategic requirements and my experience commanding both,” [Rear-Admiral Clarke] said. “Provided the right questions are asked at the right level, I’d be very surprised if the US did not favourably consider this.”

In that case, they can fucking well pay for them.

Former submariner Rex Patrick, who trains the Australian, Malaysian and Singaporean navies in undersea warfare, says, “Australia’s annual submarine cost is approaching $1 billion. This has given us a pedestrian capability that usually delivers only two deployable boats. For $2 billion, we could build four Type 214s, which would supply navy with a dependable, high-end platform that meets 90 per cent of our requirements.”

The "Type 214s" refers to a German design that is designed for the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic rather than the warmer and relatively shallower waters to Australia's north. That 10% requirements gap is a worry - to use a journo-cliche, the devil is in the details - and the doubling of expenditure is almost certainly not on.

To depart from Joye - why are submarines so labour-intensive? I accept that submarines are vital elements of Australia's defence, and an area where we - to use the dread phrase - punch above our weight. That said, it is stupid having so many personnel on board each one. Given that there is a dearth of personnel willing to work on submarines, why not turn this into an engineering challenge and have as few people as possible aboard them - or none. Drone submarines! Yes, the ten-year-old I once was smiles at the very idea. Pyow-pyow!

Times probably are tight at the AFR but this is the very point where resources must be put to best use, and no further trashing of the brand must be permitted. Christopher Joye is a fine economics commentator, and options for him to write sensible stories within his scope of competence should not be limited in a so-called financial review. He is the wrong person to allocate to idle non-stories like the submarine thing. Joye will survive as an economic commentator long after desperate and trivial ploys like this (or anything else Mike Stutchbury might do) have played out to nothing, and hopefully Joye will retain the wit and perspective to describe these days of hubris to us all.

Update 12 November: Reader, Joye has blocked me for the above.

He is squirting out articles on how wonderful nuclear submarines are by US academics, where they a) have different maritime priorities to ours and b) their Navy is regularly beaten by ours in tests of best use of submarine technology and c) the US has a mature nuclear power industry and we do not. Still, it exposes an important modus operandi of Joye's: cover up your lack of research by insinuating with People With Impressive Sounding Titles, rather than displaying any scrap of humility and good grace when caught napping.

Joye is out of his depth on journalism covering non-economic matters. He is seduced by all that journo crap of scoops, and of shrugging off/blocking criticism from readers - and even describing his output as a "yarn", giving no confidence as to accuracy. I could use another maritime analogy of rats deserting sinking ships, but Joye is demonstrating the reverse of this: sad, really.

Tone deaf and defensive

At a time when Labor is supposedly bleeding internally over the leadership and the upheavals in the ministry that flowed from it, you would imagine that the Coalition - unafflicted by if not invulnerable to such ructions, apparently - would be making out like bandits with uncommitted voters. Instead, they are playing to their own base as though they, and not Labor, were in need of defending and rebuilding.

Tony Abbott's comments in defence of ADF culture (here, about three-quarters of the way down) are instructive. It's true that ADF personnel vote Coalition more than any other profession. It's also true that, while pride in the armed forces is not unique to conservatives, it is central to conservative conceptions of Australia, its (sorry, 'her') history and the purpose of government. You can understand why he'd want to represent any sort of criticism of the ADF as a swingeing assault of an institution at the core of the nation's life, one of great pride to almost all Australians, as a political maneuver to portray Labor as antithetical to the nation's values. Even so, it didn't work.

Every Federal MP who has been in office a while will have received complaints from those who had been dedicated members of the Australian Defence Force, but who had found themselves ensnared in some Kafkaesque nightmare and shunted out of what was not only their career but part of an attempt to fuse their identity with that of the nation. I would be very surprised if the office of the Member for Warringah is an exception to that.

Over many years, we have seen story after story after story about how the ADF is endemically unable to deal with the sorts of sexual harassment cases. The "rotten apple" thing becomes unconvincing after a while.

This was an opportunity for Abbott to start identifying his weaknesses and working on turning them around - particularly his standing with women, at a time when a female Prime Minister was supposedly so weak that she was a role model to nobody. By defending the ADF from any and all charges of misogyny and ineptitude, and linking such failure to "the ANZAC spirit", he has not won or retained a single vote. Nobody who is vaguely regretting having voted Labor in 2010 is convinced that they must vote Coalition at the next opportunity as a result of that effort. His whole position on that issue was not worth taking, and almost certainly did his cause some harm.

Abbott's claim that if there is no crime committed then there is no problem, and that a commander who has been clumsy is unworthy of censure, rings hollow. You don't want your leader ringing hollow. Especially not on International Women's Day: the whole idea that Peta Credlin, Julie Bishop, any female Coalition MP/Senator/candidate or even his own daughters provide civilising influences on Abbott's more Neanderthal tendencies is completely rubbished by his attempts to rally the lads to a dysfunctional status quo. Good, positive policy like this sank like a SIEV. It was dopey politics, squandering an opportunity to stick it to a supposedly vulnerable government.

Coalition supporters will tell you that Abbott is under no obligation to release his policies early, and they're right. Policy papers don't have the impact they once did, when journalists and voters would write to the offices of the respective parties requesting policy papers so that they could compare and discuss them. Policy papers these days are advertising copy made up of dot-points. They are not worth writing, let alone reading, and what little detail they have becomes non-core in the face of the inevitable post-election Budget Black Hole. The idea that All Will Be Revealed In Good Time when the policy documents are released is a joke. Every statement, every vote over the course of a term builds a picture of what a government or an opposition is like, a picture that even the most lavish ad campaign can't shake.

All that no, no, no has entered the soul of the Coalition, and has certainly coloured public perceptions of them even if they haven't quite hardened into voting intentions (more reasons why polls are crap). Policy papers promising love and sunshine from the Coalition can't and won't change that, not even with uncritical media coverage. The squandered opportunities to bring out the best in ADF personnel by casting out the worst is one example: if you're going to get rid of dud teachers, surely the task is all the more urgent with dud ADF personnel. ADF personnel don't get to choose the teams they are assigned to, they have to work with whomever they're assigned to work with: in that context harassment/bullying can be seen as insubordination. It is bullshit to assert that a creep who harasses subordinates is really a mighty warrior and must be respected as such. Tony Abbott has committed the Coalition to not improving but maintaining an ADF which is weakened by its failure to tackle the sorts of problems that have largely been addressed (if not entirely resolved) in wider Australian society. Be it on his own head, and on those who would stand with him.

The Australian is rarely more pathetic when it tries to put one over its own readers. It reports this, it reports that, but fails to link the two as part of a whole problem within the ADF, and adequately assess whether it is Abbott or Smith who is taking the most appropriate response. Nobody expects that august journal of record economically pitiful catalogue of Chris Mitchell's insecurities and failures to start shirtfronting Abbott, but it has a role in nudging him away from indefensibly dopey positions.

Abbott insists that the Defence Minister must have the confidence of the ADF, but I can't think of a single occupant of that office who was ever really beloved from the top brass to the lowest ranks for having personnel interest at heart. Peter Reith came closest to bending the ADF to his will when he defended the claim that asylum-seekers had thrown children into the Arafura Sea despite ADF personnel, respectfully and deferentially, disagreeing that any such thing had taken place. His career ended soon thereafter.

The fact that the Shadow Defence Minister is invisible and hasn't mixed it with Defence policy wonks is a concern because it gives no indicaton as to what we might expect in this area from a Coalition government. It's extraordinary for conservatives, who supposedly live and breathe Defence stuff. Contrast Johnston's small-target obscurity with Smith's up-front, almost Keatingesque, approach.

Smith deserves credit for taking on that culture, ending the last vestiges of gender-specific roles and giving the benefit of the doubt to complainants over ossified symbols of an unsustainable way of operating. Airing of those old assault cases, giving hope to the possibility of a military justice system that was destroyed by sticking up for the alco-loser in command of of HMAS Melbourne in the 1960s, is no small thing.

Apart from the essential purchase of transport vessels for the Navy, Smith has avoided being sucked in to the expensive, underperforming defence equipment purchases that have ruined the reputations of his predecessors back to Reith. Drones seem to have almost obviated the tank and perhaps the fighter jet, and it could be that drone submarines are the answer to the problem facing the Navy is staffing and equipping our underwater defences. Smith seems to believe that if he can get the right people and get rid of some dickheads, smarter decisions and recommendations will result. Stephanie Peatling's article on Smith's handling of disciplinary issues at ADFA is the best article on that topic.

Whether we're talking about the Defence needs of the nation, or the right of one person to feel like they're valued on their merits rather than their gender, you have to wish Smith good luck because at least he's trying. It's more than you can hope for from the Coalition under its current leadership.

Update: Hugh Riminton raises doubts for old Walkley's sake, but ends up vindicating Smith rather than condemning him. The differentiation between shaving foam and Jif made Riminton look absurd, rather than Smith being "wrong on every level". As an old scoophound he is no doubt grateful for a leaked document on which to hang a story, but he should have questioned the leaker's/s' motives more closely.