Seduction of Dr Nelson (Australia's new Defence Minister)

The Weekend Australian ^ | 18th February 2006 | Greg Sheridan

[naturalman1975]

THE Seduction of Joe Tynan was one of the sweetest if most melancholy political movies ever made. It starred Alan Alda as the eponymous hero, a charismatic, high-energy, idealistic congressman on the way up. Throughout the movie, though he operates from the best of intentions, Tynan is seduced in part by Meryl Streep but mainly by his ego and ambition, especially his quest for party preferment, until he betrays his family, and his ideals.

There is absolutely nothing to suggest the new Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, will betray either his ideals or anything else (certainly not his family) in his new portfolio. But clearly he is the subject of a serious attempt at seduction.

Nelson, intellectually capable, personally ambitious, politically saleable, energetic in policy terms - will probably be the first defence minister since Kim Beazley for whom the portfolio is not the last before retirement. He stands every chance of being a very significant defence minister, which is why he will be the object of serial seduction attempts.

Defence is an $18 billion portfolio which, at least as much as Nelson's last portfolio, education, goes to the heart of Australian identity. The Australian Defence Force, and especially the army, have come back to the centre of Australian life under the prime ministership of John Howard.

Since 1996 the Government's defence policies have described a fascinating arc. They started with more or less uncritical acceptance of the paradigm inherited from the days when Beazley was defence minister. The ADF was to be designed solely for the narrow continental defence of Australia, which meant all concentration on airplanes and submarines and a woefully neglected, under-manned and under-equipped army.

This paradigm, which might be described as "little Australia", never squared with our strategic reality as we continued to deploy the army everywhere. The wake-up call was the East Timor deployment in 1999 when our army, though it performed brilliantly, was exposed as too small, too ill-equipped and without adequate logistics capabilities.

East Timor showed us the army might have to do something besides mop up mythical invaders politely coming across the Arafura Sea envisaged under DOA.

The second wake-up call was the 9/11 terror attacks. The US alliance was invoked for the first time and the Howard Government has since drawn measurably closer to the Americans in the war on terror, joining US-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Howard himself has made a series of speeches in which he has grown progressively bolder in declaring that Australia has global security interests; that in the age of terrorism, potential nuclear terrorism and missiles, geography is less a defence than it used to be; and Australia needs a defence force that can contribute to safeguarding our interests.

The previous defence minister, Robert Hill, like Howard, gradually moved away from the DOA paradigm, so that the Defence Update, issued last December, began with the words: "The first duty of the Australian Government is to provide for the security and defence of Australia and Australian interests."

The theological parsing of defence statements may seem of little moment to the general public. But that sentence constituted Hill, on behalf of the Government, breaking decisively with the Beazley paradigm of DOA.

DOA is particularly associated with former defence public servants Paul Dibb and Hugh White. Both were highly critical of Hill. Both opposed the Government's decision to harden and network the army, a decision which makes the army more deployable in all circumstances. Both have been extremely unhappy with the Government's decision to build two huge amphibious ships, which would have many uses but which could above all carry 1000 soldiers, and all of their helicopters and such like, each.

These ships, and the soldiers on them, would be protected by air warfare destroyers.

Both Dibb and White have attacked this formation. Hill told me that in his view Dibb and White didn't like the ships and the army improvements because they "wouldn't want to deploy".

In one sense, therefore, Nelson's choice is simple: is he going to implement Howard's defence policy or Beazley's?

For undoubtedly the "old paradigm" gang are plotting a big comeback. Dibb began the attempted seduction with an opinion piece in The Australian on January 26. After rubbishing Hill, who would be condemned by history, he said, he buttered up Joe Tynan, er, that is, the new Defence Minister: "Nelson's experience in combatting an entrenched tertiary education sector and making it more accountable should serve him well in defence."

Indeed Dibb's formulation is almost the exact reverse of the truth. While it is always tempting for a new minister to rubbish his predecessor, and Dibb's invitation to Nelson to do so, at least in his own mind, is a pretty obvious pscyhological ploy, Hill had to fight tooth and nail to get the Howard vision accepted by the defence civilian bureaucracy, much of which is still considerably more comfortable with the Beazley paradigm.

Dibb used to deploy the rather bizarre rhetorical device of painting Hill as some kind of rogue minister, who had apparently hypnotised Howard into approving these monstrous defence follies against the true inner Howard who actually believed in the Dibb-Beazley DOA paradigm.

It is notorious that Hill had to send documents back again and again to Defence so that they would actually take account of government policy, instead of ongoing mandarin consensus.

Hill had the temerity to think that civilian control of defence meant control rested with the cabinet, the prime minister and the minister, whereas every good bureaucrat knows that civilian control means control rests with the civilians in the Defence Department. Nelson has kept only one of Hill's former staff and he has hired Aldo Borgu, late of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Borgu is a perfectly competent and good person, but it's interesting that in his commentary in the past few years he has echoed many of the Dibb-White criticisms of Howard Government policy.

Nelson was kind enough to have a talk with me yesterday and he stressed continuity. He is not planning a new White Paper, which many see as a perfect chance for the old school to reassert their influence.

He also said inter alia: "Security in the Middle East means security for all human beings on the planet, including Australians ... Terrorism is a global threat and there's nowhere to hide ... The notion is coming through in Labor policy of why are we in Iraq, we should have everything concentrated in Australia, and that's very dangerous."

So at this stage Nelson seems to prefer the Howard paradigm to the Beazley paradigm. He is certainly smart enough to suss all this out on his own. I suspect he may disappoint the old guard, whose powers of seduction are withering with the years.