Government abuses public servants at its peril

The 12 March 2017 edition of The Sydney Morning Herald carried an op-ed by economics writer Ross Gittins under the title Abused public servants help bring Turnbull down.

In this article, about “the Centrelink robo-debt stuff-up”, Gittings makes three points which have general validity for relationships between the Government and the public service; points which any government would be wise to consider:

• making the department heads fear for their jobs should they do anything to annoy the government
• while you can always bully the top public servants into covering for you, when you mistreat the servants they stop warning you about the hazards you face and, ultimately, indulge in schadenfreude when you fall over the cliff
• limiting the ability of their departments to pass on unwelcome advice by interposing “a bunch of young punks and political wannabes” between them and their senior officials

How the once-fine Australian Public Service came to its current state has a long history. The fundamental change goes back to 1984 when the Public Service reforms introduced by John Dawkins, Minister assisting the Prime Minister in Public Service Matters in the Hawke Labor Government. It was from that time that what had once been known as Permanent Heads were placed on what were loosely described as 5-year contracts but which turned out not to be contracts at all – they were term appointments which the Government could terminate at will.

The insecure position in which this has placed Department Secretaries has been made abundantly clear first by John Howard and then by Tony Abbott, each of whom sacked several Department Heads on coming to office. More subtly, John Howard placed at least two Defence Secretaries on short term appointments (three years), neither of which was renewed. The message is plain: do what you are told, don’t make waves, don’t bring to light any inconvenient truths, or you will have your appointment terminated.

This situation has a chilling effect all the way down the command chain. A Department Secretary who does not want to be confronting the Minister with inconvenient realities will sideline Division Heads who they suspect will bring forward inconvenient information and analysis which they would have a duty to take up with the Minister. If we need yes-persons at the top, we need yes-persons all the way down the line. A fish rots from the head, as the old Chinese proverb would have it.

Read Gittins’ article in full here.

Howard's War - a continuation of politics by other means

For the discerning reader the Palazzo Report, the classified internal report on how we got into Iraq and how we fared, prepared by Army Historian Dr Albert Palazzo and now released in redacted form, is a remarkable document. Although heavily redacted in places, it offers a rich store of information about how the Howard Government conducted itself in the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Government’s intent, and the state of the Army it sent to war.

Having been prepared for internal consumption by a professional researcher with access to the key players and to classified documents, it is a very difficult document to dismiss as a source. It deserves to be taken seriously, very seriously indeed.

What the document shows is that John Howard’s decision to involve us in the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had very little to do with any threat to Australia’s national security, and had as its prime intent the winning of plaudits from the Americans.

There was no strategy, no end-state that the Australian Government wished the ADF to achieve – it was all about “being there”. In Dr Palazzo’s words, “From a political policy angle Australia’s participation was an alliance issue, not a military one”, and later, “From the Howard Government’s perspective … the war’s effect on the domestic political situation took precedence over the country’s international relationship with the United States”.

This shaped the Government’s attitude to the composition of the force, the assets it was prepared to release, the amount of money it was prepared to spend, and the extent to which it was prepared to risk incurring casualties.

The fact that the whole exercise was contoured around the political interests of the Howard Government meant that the preparations were conducted in extraordinary secrecy – presumably because the Government wanted to keep its political options open until the last moment. In pursuing its essentially domestic political intent the Government dealt less than honestly not only with the Australian public and the Parliament, but also with our American allies.

Right up to the eve of the invasion the Government maintained not only to the Australian public but to the Americans that the Government was not yet committed to join in the invasion – palpable nonsense because we had a significant contingent participating in the detailed planning at Central Command (CENTCOM) Headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Nevertheless, the Americans had to conduct themselves throughout on the basis of the fiction that we had yet to make a decision.

The politics of the situation meant we were unhelpful to the Americans in more substantive ways. One of the force elements that the ADF planners examined in the greatest depth was a reconnaissance battle group, apparently because it was one of the ADF assets that senior US officers and CENTCOM planners consistently expressed a keen interest in. US planners had identified a capability gap in their force structure – the security of the western flank of the 1^st Marine Division during its drive on Baghdad – and they looked to the Australian Army to remedy the problem. This was a task for which our light cavalry had been designed, and Army Headquarters pushed for the deployment of an ASLAV-based contingent. This would have involved the deployment of about 2000 personnel.

CDF Cosgrove had formed the view, however, that in order to receive the Government’s assent the deployed establishment the unit’s establishment would have to be of the order of 600 soldiers. At this size the AHQ planners had concerns over the unit’s ability to protect itself, and we made our excuses to the Americans. We played hard ball on that, making it clear that if the Americans wanted the cavalry unit it would have to be the subject of a formal request from President Bush to Prime Minister Howard. We declined other requests that we could have fulfilled.

On the size of what we ultimately contributed to this exercise in saving humanity from Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD, Dr Palazzo commented:

In the end, due to the political requirements of the Bush Administration, it probably did not matter what Australia brought to the table, which allowed Howard to offer only niche capabilities and to take steps to minimise the risk to the personnel the ADF did send to the [Middle East Area of Operations]. There were some consequences in the Australian attitude, however. Some US officers began to make the derisive comment that the ADF’s commitment was ‘a series of headquarters’.

Perhaps the greatest deceit was the way the Government misrepresented to the people and the Parliament the reasons for the deployment. In announcing Australia’s commitment to the war Howard highlighted Iraq’s WMD and the likelihood that these weapons would make their way into the hands of international terrorists, but did not commit to the objective of regime change. He knew, however, from a very early stage (I suspect as early as 1998 when Dick Cheney visited Canberra) that the Bush Administration was committed to the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, he committed such a small Australian force that it had necessarily to be integrated into the US force, with regime change a fundamental objective. As Palazzo put it:

Once the war began, ADF forces who engaged Iraqi forces did so under US operational command and by default in support of their ally’s desire to overthrow Saddam, no matter the sophistry of the more limited Australian intent.

Two key conclusions stand out from Dr Pallazo’s report. First, it strengthens the case for an independent inquiry, along the lines of the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry, into how we came to be involved in the invasion of Iraq. There is enough in the report to demonstrate that there were all sorts of goings on of which the Australian public should be made aware, but not enough to write the definitive history from which we can draw and benefit from the lessons to be learned.

Second, that we cannot afford to have Executive Government (Cabinet) play such games with us in the future. Going to war is a serious business, and we must reform the way we make our decisions so that our elected representatives in the Parliament are fully involved and fully accountable.

Note: This piece was first posted on the blog Pearls and Irritations on 10 March 2017 – view original here.

ADFAS Armidale Young Arts Grants

I have received the following message from the Armidale Branch of the Australian Design and Fine Arts Association, which I am posting in order to help spread word of this opportunity for young people interested in making their way in the arts.

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Dear ADFAS Armidale members,

I am writing to seek your support to spread the word that our ADFAS Armidale Young Arts Grants are available again in 2017.

If you know of young people or organisations that may qualify for a grant we would be grateful if you would encourage them to apply.

In 2016 ADFAS Armidale supported more than two thousand young people in the New England region in art, music, drama and dance and yarn bombing.

Small grants are available from a pool of approximately $5,000 each year, raised by membership donations and raffles to support a wide range of programs.

Youth programs which help address the challenges of geographic isolation, support activities which reach a wide cross section of the community, provide opportunities for young people which have the potential to be life-changing and have a long-term impact on the community are of particular interest to ADFAS Armidale.

Further information, guidelines and application forms can be found on ADFAS Armidale's website http://www.adfas.org.au/societies/new-south-wales-act/armidale/  and our Facebook page www.facebook.com/adfasarmidale/

Please don’t hesitate to contact the ADFAS Armidale Young Arts Co-ordinator Graeme Fordham (email: glfordham@gmail.com) for further information.

Thank you for your consideration.

With warm regards

Graeme Fordham AM

Young Arts Co-ordinator

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Boycotting the nuclear treaty talks

The 22 February edition of The Sydney Morning Herald published an op-ed by Dr Sue Wareham of and me under the title Australia's unprecedented decision to snub nuclear talks is irresponsible. Full text below.

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Australia is about to do something unprecedented in the conduct of our international relations.  We are about to boycott major UN multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations. On 27 March in New York, negotiations will commence on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, following a strongly-supported resolution passed in the General Assembly on 23 December - with 123 nations in favour, 38 against and 16 abstentions -  which voted for “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination”. 

The UN resolution and the forthcoming negotiations are the result of intense government and civil society action in recent years that has highlighted the catastrophic humanitarian impacts of these most terrifying and destructive of all weapons, and the absolute imperative to prevent any further use. However, Australia has consistently maintained that we must rely on US nuclear weapons to “protect” us (“extended deterrence”), and therefore will not rule out their use on our behalf.  Exactly how or under what circumstances that protection would manifest, or against which populations a nuclear bomb might be launched on our behalf, has never been explained.

Australia’s boycott of the disarmament talks, a decision that was made public just last week [on 16 February], will have grave implications, quite apart from the unconscionable act of snubbing the most promising disarmament initiative in decades.  It calls into question our commitment not only to the UN but also to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), article 6 of which obliges all member states – not just those with the weapons – to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to…. nuclear disarmament”.  

The key to a ban treaty’s effectiveness lies in its power to delegitimise and stigmatise weapons that kill and maim whole populations indiscriminately.  Which nation would boast of a “smallpox deterrent” or a “nerve gas deterrent”?  Yet despite the existence of treaties to ban these other weapons of mass destruction, there is still no equivalent treaty to ban the only weapons that can destroy a city in an instant and leave human suffering and environmental devastation on a scale we can’t imagine.

The US, which has been the strongest opponent of the ban treaty process, with Australia as our ally’s most active and vocal supporter, has conceded behind closed doors that a ban treaty will have exactly its intended purpose.  A letter from the US Mission to NATO, to its NATO allies on October 17 last year, expressed alarm that a nuclear weapons prohibition could, among other things, “make it impossible to undertake nuclear planning or training”.  Indeed; that’s the whole point of the thing.

Australia’s boycott will also render our advocacy in other areas less credible. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s frequent pronouncements on the need for a rules based international system will ring very hollow if Australia actively undermines this historic effort to strengthen international law and give effect to the disarmament obligation written into the NPT.

How will Australia be able to condemn nuclear missile tests by, say, North Korea, or other possible future proliferators, when we actively support a nuclear apartheid, and oppose efforts to place all nuclear-armed nations on the same legal footing?

And in the region, Australia will yet again stick out as merely an appendage to the US rather than an independently-thinking nation that considers global interests and its own interests above those of its ally.  Every South-East Asian nation, and all Pacific Island nations (save Micronesia which is still very vulnerable to US pressure) support the delegitimising of nuclear weapons via a treaty banning their development, testing, manufacture, deployment and use.  New Zealand has, again, been a leader in the process. China is considering attending the negotiations.

Australia’s approach to nuclear disarmament was best summed up in Senate Estimates on 26 October last year, when a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade representative was questioned on it.  The response was that “In order to be able to effectively carry forward disarmament, you need to have a world in which there is not a threat of nuclear weapons and people feel safe and secure”. In other words, Australia will look at the need to get rid of the weapons when they no longer exist. 

Australia’s decision is irresponsible, and unworthy of a nation that - notwithstanding our support for extended nuclear deterrence - has had a long history of engaging with UN disarmament initiatives.  Whatever we have to say about this vital issue, we should be at the table saying it.  The decision should be reversed.

Paul Barratt AO, former Secretary, Department of Defence

Sue Wareham OAM, Vice-President, ICAN (Australia), the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

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Forthcoming Report on Post Traumatic Stress Injury

On Friday 9 September Australia21 (www.Australia21.org.au), in collaboration with FearLess, will be launching an essay volume designed to raise awareness of Post Traumatic Stress, and to form the basis of a future roundtable designed to improve our understanding of this widespread problem and help set the agenda for further work on it.

Below is the text of the Foreword I wrote for this forthcoming report.

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Australia21 is an independent public policy think tank. Inspired by the Canadian Institute of Advance Research (CIAR), it was founded in 2001 to develop new frameworks of understanding about complex problems that are important to Australia’s future. For fifteen years we have been bringing together multidisciplinary groups of leading thinkers, researchers and policymakers to consider issues about our future, ranging from climate and the landscape, our society and our economy to Australia’s place in the world.

Typically the issues we deal with are those which social scientists call “wicked problems”. They are difficult to define clearly: different stakeholders have different versions if what the problem is, and there is usually an element of truth in each of those versions. They have many interdependencies and are often multi-causal. They hardly ever sit conveniently within the responsibilities of one organisation, and the organisations that need to be parties to the solution often have conflicting responsibilities and goals, which necessitates trade-offs between conflicting goals.

Our modus operandi is to work in collaboration rather than competition with those who have insights into the issues we tackle. It is rarely the case that any of the stakeholders lack state of the art awareness, or access to it, of the parts of the issue that fall within their responsibilities. Australia21 finds that its best value add comes from bringing together in the one room as broad a range of stakeholders and relevant subject matter experts as possible, to compare notes, in a systematic way, on what we think we know about the issue, and even more importantly, what we do not know, but need to know, in order manage the issue more effectively.

In the case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or as I would prefer to call it Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI), we have an issue which affects not only the current wellbeing of an enormous number of Australians and permanent residents, but through that, their capacity to realise their full potential over the course of their lives. Often identified in the public mind as a problem arising from traumatic experiences in the course of military service, we find that PTSI in fact arises in a variety of segments of society. Sometimes it is the result of situations that people will inevitably encounter in certain occupations: among first responder organisations (police, fire-fighters, ambulance and other paramedics) trauma surgeons and nurses, for example. For others it is the consequence of sexual assault including sexual abuse of children, or other forms of social dysfunction: domestic violence, or drug or alcohol-fuelled violence within the community within which a person is trapped, or the circumstances which have forced people to flee their countries of origin and seek refuge in Australia.

Estimates put the numbers of Australians who live with PTSI (those directly affected plus their immediate families) as high as 3-4 million. This is an enormous proportion of our population living lives that range from tragic and/or dangerous, to “lives of quiet despair”, to lives that are simply not as productive and enjoyable as they could and should be. Clearly this comes at a very large cost: the economic and social costs of people being unable to rise to their full potential, and the costs in terms of overall societal wellbeing.

It also entails societal risk, where PTSI sufferers reach the point where they cannot perform their duties safely and effectively and become a risk to themselves and to members of the wider society.

Clearly the aims in dealing with such a major and important problem must be find ways to manage the risks that are inherent in certain occupations, to identify individuals’ emerging problems in sufficient time to allow a full recovery, and to address organisation cultural issues that make people reluctant to acknowledge that they are struggling. In order to achieve that, we need to put solid flesh on the bones of these aspirations.

Our aim in bringing together this collection of essays to gather together in one place a set of short readable essays by some of the most expert people in the country, covering every aspect of the problem: the nature and extent of the problem of trauma-associated stress in Australia; hazards in specific groups; societal and economic costs, and what is done and needs to be done. This collection will be used as the basis for a roundtable in which we ask as many as practicable of the contributors to view the subject as a whole and make their expert contribution to considering where we go from here.

If by so doing we can contribute to the identification of gaps in our knowledge and our procedures, we will consider that as time well spent.

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Election priorities

It is amazing what we do and don’t discuss these days in the course of election campaigns, or the "phony war" that precedes them. At the present time we seem to be endlessly fascinated by what is to happen to the threshold for the second highest personal income tax scale to cut in, a matter which will leave 75% of taxpayers unaffected and will have a trivial effect on most of the rest.

Meanwhile, we have young Australians in Iraq, without, as far as I can tell, the form of authorisation required by our Constitution, and without the protection of a Status of Forces Agreement with the Government of Iraq. The effect of this is that they do not have the appropriate authorisation from either government to kill or capture people or destroy their property, and would find it difficult if brought before a tribunal to plead the defence that they were obeying lawful orders. Then on Saturday night ABC TV News revealed that these people are not simply training the Iraqi Army “behind the wire” at Camp Taji, they are following close behind them as they go into combat. Meanwhile, the Government of Iraq is collapsing in a heap. Is anyone talking about this? Not as far as I can tell. There was a time when matters of war and peace captured some attention during election campaigns, but no longer, it seems.

Seventieth Anniversary of the end of the Pacific War

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific.

On this day in 1945 my father was on board the MV Duntroon, as head of a Prisoner of War Relief Unit, together with a contingent of Australian General Hospital (Army) nurses. The vessel was bound for India, the mission of those on board being to aid the POWs being liberated from the Japanese in Burma.

When news of the Japanese surrender came through, the vessel was diverted to Singapore, arriving there on the day Lord Louis Mountbatten accepted the formal surrender from the Japanese commander. They set up headquarters in Changi Gaol, and began the dreadful business of assessing the physical and psychological state of the prisoners in Changi and those coming down from the Burma-Thailand Railway and the outlying camps.

The matron in charge of the AGH contingent was the remarkable Madge Brown, whom I got to know well in my school days as she took up a position straight after the war as administrator of student accommodation at the New England University College/University of New England, a position she still held when I left Armidale in 1966. Madge had an eventful war: among her other claims to fame was the fact that she had been in Tobruk during the siege. It was a privilege to have known her.

For more on Madge Brown, see  Ida Madge Brown (1904-2009).