The Three Pillars Of Labor’s National Security Policy Kevin Rudd - Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs

Speech

Transcript - National Press Club Telstra Address - 15 October 2003

Last weekendI was reading Dark Victory by Marian Wilkinson and David Marr.

In the current political environment, it makes for a sobering read.

It chronicles the political strategy employed by our Prime Minister in the last months of his last term in office in order to secure political victory at the last federal election.

And it worked. They won. We lost. And the rest is history.

Most of the post-mortems have focussed on what Labor did wrong. And we have much to learn from that.

Very little of the analysis however has focussed on what Dark Victory says about the Liberals and the way in which their political strategy is now likely to unfold for the next election.

After all, we now find ourselves at about the same time in the electoral cycle.

For me, it feels uncannily like the period just following the Ryan by-election in March 2001. A Government beginning to look a little ragged. A reshuffle then followed by a spending splurge to try and restore some semblance of social policy credibility. Followed then by the stupendous political manipulation of the Tampa – many of whose passengers by the way are now happily residing in the country that the Prime Minister said they were never supposed to set foot in. But let's not be picky.

Fast forward to late 2003 and we have a government at a comparable point in the cycle looking genuinely ragged again on health and higher education, a reshuffle, a $7.5 billion surplus, a health minister with a blank cheque handed to him by the Prime Minister, and Phillip Ruddock, the architect of Tampa 1, quietly plotting away like Mr Burns in the Simpsons in his new portfolio of Attorney General as he seeks to identify Tampa 2 for the next election.

The key question is: will it work?

What I'd like to do today is give you a couple of reasons whyI don't think it will.

And I'd also like to explain where national security policy and foreign policy fit in to the equation as well.

A breach of trust

Trust is a fragile commodity in politics. Hard earned. Easily lost.

And when you are losing it, you usually aren't aware that it is happening to you.

Until of course you hear the sound of something cracking.

By which time it's usually too late.

I've worked for governments like that where superficially everything seemed hunky dory – and then bang.

Trust grows from truth. If you get into the habit of consistently getting too cute with the truth, at a certain point something starts to give.

And that is where we have got to today with the Howard government.

Out in main street australia you start to feel it - and iraq has been its tipping point, although by no means its total account.

It began in John Howard's first term when the Prime Minister did not tell the truth about the training of mercenaries in Dubai.

Then in the second term the Prime Minister did not tell the truth over Tampa.

This was followed in this place almost exactly two years ago when the Prime Minister did not tell the truth about children overboard.

And then in the current parliament Iraq where, for our Prime Minister, the truth has indeed become a foreign country.

Some say that not telling the truth over Iraq at the end of the day doesn't matter because no Australian troops have been killed, so what if the pm lied through his teeth because the people don't give a damn.

I beg to differ. Over time the Australian people do make a judgment about the character of their Prime Minister and the character of their government. Not based on a single event. But on a pattern of events.

And with Iraq, there has been plenty to choose from.

Prior to the war, john howard and his ministers made multiple claims to the Australian Parliament and people that Iraq possessed stockpiles of completed chemical and biological weapons and that war was necessary to remove those weapons.

Subsequent to the war, John Howard and his ministers have retreated from that claim, referring instead increasingly to wmd research programs rather than completed weapons ready for use, reinforced by the discomforting reality that the u.s. wmd inspection team after the war is thus far been unable to locate any completed weapons systems.

John Howard says after six months they need more time. It is passing strange that the inspection team after five months had had time enough.

Prior to the war, John Howard and his ministers told the australian parliament and people that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and that evidence of this lay in the fact that iraq had sought to import uranium from Africa.

Subsequent to the war, Foreign Minister Downer has publicly admitted that this claim was false.

Prior to the war, John Howard and his ministers said repeatedly that it was necessary to invade Iraq in order to reduce the risk of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists.

Subsequent to the war, it has been revealed John Howard was advised by British intelligence that, contrary to his claims to the Australian Parliament and people, an invasion of Iraq was likely to increase the risk of any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists.

Prior to the war, John Joward and his ministers told the Australian Parliament and people that attacking Iraq was necessary in order to reduce the overall risk of terrorism.

Subsequent to the war, it has be revealed that John Howard was advised by British intelligence prior to the commencement of hostilities that any attack of Iraq was likely to increase the overall threat of terrorism.

The breach of trust on this latter point is perhaps the most serious of all.

Because what has happened is that the warnings of British intelligence appear to be coming true.

Within Iraq itself, the country is now awash with Al Qaeda terrorists.

But it does not stop there. John Howard's undertaking to the Australian people was that the war against Iraq was necessary to reduce the overall threat of terrorism. But here in our own region, our own neighbourhood, our own backyard, the recruiting base of Al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah and their sister organisations in south east asia has been enhanced enormously by the Iraq war.

The Iraq war is leading to the middle easternisation of militant islamic politics in South East Asia. That is not my view. It is the considered view of the world's leading analysts of islamist terrorist organisations in South East Asia, including Dr Zachary Abuza.

So the great untruth that has been told to the Australian people that Australian participation in an invasion of Iraq was necessary to reduce the terrorism threat to Australia has now come well and truly home to roost within our own region.

The bottom line is that john howard has been loose with the truth on national security. Not once. Not twice. But we have documented at least 41 separate occasions when john howard and his ministers made explicit claims about iraq weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism that are either wrong, remain unproven, or for which contrary intelligence information existed at the time.

These claims, coupled with the contrary intelligence information that was at the government's private disposal through the pre-war period, is outlined in the 49-page document i am releasing today, with the elegant title: "honest john – loose with the truth on national security volume i". Before the next election, i fear i'll be releasing volume ii as well.

The point of all of this is that the australian people have taken it all in. They may not have reached final conclusions about it. But there has been too much of it. And they don't like it.

And the political problem for the howard government is that if it seeks to manipulate the national security agenda again in the lead up to the next election as they did with tampa, it will start with a political credibility this time which is already under serious strain.

A fractured social contract

If John Howard is to apply his 2001 script a second time around, its second arm is the rapid restitution of some form of social policy credibility. Once again, however, there is a problem of trust.

John Howard has sought consistently to rewrite the australian social contract that has been crafted over more than a century. In doing so, John Howard's central organising principle has been simple: to transfer financial responsibility from government to families and individuals across the board.

We see this in the health care system with the collapse in bulk billing. We see it in higher education with the escalation of HECS fees to the point of financial unaffordability for working famlies. We see it with nursing homes. We see it with the effective freezing of out of school hours care programs and we see it in the workplace.

John howard, australia's definition of essex man, is the most ideologically driven politician this country has seen. But John Howard has sought to mask the radical nature of his unravelling of the australian social contract. One of those masks is his periodic manipulation of the national security agenda as we have seen through a combination of operation Tampa and more recently, operation fridge magnet.

John Howard's problem, however, is that the australian people are beginning to see through this.

They know there is a real national security agenda. And they know there is a manufactured national security agenda as well.

There is an emerging, palpable and mounting anger out in suburban and regional australia about the overall withdrawal of social services. In my own electorate in brisbane, bulk billing has collapsed from 88% to 58% in just three years.

The bottom line with all of this is that the people do notice. They are slow to judgement. But they know there is a social revolution underway. Equally, they know that they don't like it.

So the possibility of John Howard, Peter Costello and Tony Abbott deciding now to throw some last minute money at the health program, like John Howard did a couple of years ago with the added fizz of a reshuffle and a few new faces, has considerably less prospect of success.

The australian people are not dumb. They know the liberals don't believe in medicare. And the application of a dollop of gap filler in the lead up to an election is not the formula for rebuilding trust.

The Labor alternative

For these reasons, i believe the Howard Government in eminently beatable at the next federal election. And i do not belong to the fashionable school of thought that says that in an age of security, John Howard is somehow predestined to romp it home.

He knows he's got problems. He knows they've got to do with trust. And he knows they've got to do with the fracturing of the Australian social contract.

Of course to win the next federal election, we must offer the people of Australia a credible alternative policy vision for our country's future.

A secure Australia. A competitive Australia. A compassionate Australia.

A secure Australia: secure at home and secure in our region.

A competitive Australia: where we grow the economy through greater productivity, rather than simply rely upon the productivity delivered from reforms in the past.

And a compassionate Australia: where there is opportunity for all, not for some. And where caring for your fellow human beings is not regarded as an afterthought or the product of random individual acts of philanthropy, but it recognised again as a core responsibility of the community through government.

Our team is crafting a policy vision around these core labor values. Gillard on health. Macklin on higher education. Swan on families. Latham on tax. Just to name a few.

And it is a good team too. When compared person for person with those opposite it is the better team as well.

Labor's alternative national security policy

So where does labor's national security policy and foreign policy fit within the broader sweep of things?

It will be part of the script, but by no means the totality of the script, because the larger part of our enterprise now is to rebuild the Australian social contract.

Security, of course, is fundamental to everything else. It is the first responsibility of the state.

In the absense of security, an economy is undermined and a society ultimately fractured.

That is why we regard national security as part of our core business as the alternative government of Australia.

On national security, there are no soft options available. It is a hard business that requires clear-headed analysis and a comprehensive policy response.

Threats to Australia's national security

So what are the current threats to Australia's national security?

We often lose sight of the fact that a continuing threat to national and regional security lies in the large-scale, unresolved territorial conflicts that continue to dominate our part of the world. Three of the world's four major unresolved territorial disputes lie within greater Asia: the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan straits and India/Pakistan over Kashmir. Each of these territorial conflicts involves potential combatants with nuclear or other wmd capabilities. And in the last 12-months alone, two out of the three of these conflicts have risen to near crisis point.

Second, there is the threat of terrorism: both global and regional. Al Qaeda is a truly global network which has not been suppressed. Twelve months after Bali, Jemaah Islamiah remains alive and well in Indonesia. Not to mention the proliferation seven or eight ji-sister organisations across islamic South East Asia in the period since the Iraq war. And Australians and Australia remain the dominant western presence within this region.

Third, there is the rolling implosion of domestic security across Melanesia where the Solomons may prove to be the tip of the iceberg.

There are other threats to our security as well, from international people smuggling, the international narcotics trade, transnational crime, gun running and money laundering.

And finally, there are the broader questions of our long term economic and environmental security as well. Global warming has fallen right off the government's radar screen. But if left unaddressed, it will become a national security problem for the generations that follow.

Alternative policy reponses

Labor's policy response to this complex array of national security threats is constructed within the framework of three fundamental pillars: our alliance with the United States; our support for an international rules-based system based on the United Nations; and our policy of comprehensive engagement with Asia.

I contrast this with our political opponents who, when it is all stripped away, offers a single pillar alone: our alliance with the united states.

Each of Labor's three pillars has its own strategic history and its own strategic logic.

Labor initiated the alliance with the United States under John Curtin. And we have proudly owned that alliance in the 60 years that have passed since then. We support the alliance because of the importance we attach to intelligence flows in an age of global terrorism. We support the alliance because of the access it provides australia to leading edge defence technologies and equipment. And we support the alliance because it is our view that in the post-war period, the United States has by and large been a strategically stabilising force across east asia and the western pacific, and the stability that it has delivered has underpinned much of the economic growth we have seen in our region over the last half century. Furthermore, a strategic withdrawal by the united states would represent a major threat to strategic stability and the potentiality for longstanding, great power tensions to once again erupt in our region.

For Labor, however, our longstanding alliance with the United States has never been co-definitional with compliance with the United States – on every element of U.S. national security policy and foreign policy. Iraq is a case in point in which we did not see as a logical extension of the war against terrorism which we wholeheartedly supported in Afghanistan and continue to support.

The second pillar of Labor's national security policy is our commitment to an international rules-based system based on the U.N. Charter and the United Nations organisation.

Once again, labor's pawprints are all over the formation of this body through then Foreign Minister Evatt's intimate involvement in the drafting of the U.N. Charter. An Australian was the first president of the UN Security Council. And Evatt himself was the third president of the UN General Assembly.

However, our attachment to the UN is not based on historical sentiment. It is anchored in current strategic reality. Were it not for the UN, there could not have been a Cambodian peace settlement. Nor could there have been any settlement in East Timor.

Those who criticise the un because it represents good domestic political sport (as Howard, Downer and Ruddock did during the last federal election) should be reminded of Churchill's great saying on democracy: democracy, he said, was the worst system of government in the world – except for all the others. And our argument today is that the un likewise is the worst system of international government in the world, except for all the others.

This is the crucial debate of our age. Our government and our foreign minister have embraced a new doctine of unilateral military pre-emption, articulated through rolling ‘coalitions of the willing'. Iraq represented its first test run.

But if the government is in the business of effectively junking the international rules-based order which the world has had in place now for more than half a century, an order which we continue to defend, then the government has a very basic challenge at its feet.

Namely, to articulate precisely what their alternative international order will look like and what its rules of operation will be.

• First, what criteria will govern future acts of military pre-emption? Will it be against all wmd threshold states? Will it be against wmd states which support terrorist organisations? Or will it be both? And on the proposition of pre-emption itself, what confidence does the howard government now have in the legitimacy of pre-emption, given that the doctrine of pre-emption rests on first class, reliable intelligence that you or one of your allies is about to be attacked? I would have thought that at a minimum, the reliability of pre-war intelligence on iraq's wmd threat was at least now open to question.

• Second, what criteria will apply for future australian decisions to participate in future ‘coalitions of the willing'? Or will future participation in ‘coalitions of the willing' operations globally now constitute the new global price of alliance?

• Third, when will the Howard Government articulate these new principles as a replacement for those entrenched in the UN Charter? And just when will they be codified?

These are not academic questions. They are real policy questions of direct relevance to the current strategic reality confronting both the ‘coalition of the willing' and the United Nations on the ground in Iraq. The current debate in New York on a new security council resolution on Iraq represents the real life intersection of these two orders. And on this, our government continues to remain silent.

Of course, the government's silence is equally deafening when it comes to its responsibilities as an occupying power in the economic and humanitarian reconstruction of post-war Iraq. Let us be explicit about this: John Howard under pressure from the opposition and the press back in may publicly acknowledged australia's status as an occupying power in iraq under the terms of the fourth Geneva Convention – and other relevant international treaty obligations to which Australia is signatory.

Mr Downer now disputes this as reflected in an answer to a question on notice from me just recently.

It would be enormously useful for us all if the Prime Minister and foreign minister could agree whether or not australia is an occupyiong power in Iraq. The truth of the matter is that we are because we were one of three combatant states which removed the government of iraq and at that point became responsible for the civilian administration of Iraq until the establishment of an interim Iraqi Government.

You would not know it from the day to day commentary of John Howard, but under international law as of today he remains effectively one of the three pro–consuls respnosible for the physical protection of and provision of basic services to the 20 million strong iraqi population.

Why is it that we are not receiving daily situation reports on the civil administration of iraq - just as we received daily situation reports for the duration of the war itself?

The rubber hits the road later this month and next month when australia attends the international donor's conference in madrid, which will be seeking financial contributions from all states (in particular the occupying powers) based on a needs analysis that has been constructed by twelve separate working groups under the un in recent months. And then on 21 november, Mr Howard becomes conjointly responsible through the coalition provisional authority for the administration of the ‘oil for food' program currently administered by the un.

So fasten your seatbelts. In about a month's time, Australia conjointly becomes responsible, with the British and the Americans, for the provision of the entire food supply of the Iraqi population. I was disturbed recently in New York with discussions i had with the current director of that us$2.6 billion program who expressed his deep reservations to me as to whether the coalition provisional authority was currently sufficiently administratively competent to take on this role. I have already suggested publicly that wisdom would suggest leaving this program with the UN for a time yet – at least until the physical security situation is better under control.

I said the third pillar of Labor's approach to national security policy was our policy of comprehensive engagement with Asia.

Once again, this policy was initiated in government under Labor through Whitlam, through Hawke and through Keating.

Under the current government, the term is no longer used because of the government's pathological hostility towards Paul Keating in particular. More importantly, the policy is no longer being implemented. And as a consequence, the ballast of diplomatic relationships within the region, upon which we could once rely, has now been corroded. And if any of you doubt this, ask any of our diplomats in the field over a beer or two and on the assurance that what they say to you will be off the record.

Labor's policy of comprehensive engagement rests on a fundamentally piece of straight forward strategic logic: namely, if you've got good relations with your neighbours it's good for your security. If you have bad relations with your neighbours, it's bad for your security. Furthermore, if you have good relations with your neighbours it's good for your economy, exports and jobs. If you have bad relations with your neighbours, the reverse tends to apply.

Front and centre to this equation is our relationship with indonesia and how we conjointly confront the common threat of terrorism within that country. It's like the debate we've had about people smuggling. Dealing effectively with people smuggling (just like dealing effectively with terrorism) depends entirely on the strength of your working relationship with jakarta.

It is true that we have had good, on the ground cooperation with the Indonesians through the Australian federal police in the post-bali and post-marriott investigatory process. The AFP should be commended for this. Everybody, repeat everybody, in Jakarta speaks in their praise.

But if we in this country are serious about the long-term challenge of terrorism in indonesia, we must adopt a long-term comprehensive counter terrorism strategy conjointly with the government of Indonesia. We argue this should have three elements:

• We should enhance significantly our cooperative assistance to the indonesian national police, which is designated under Indonesian law as having responsibility for counter terrorism in Indonesia. At present, we are playing at the margins of this with a total assistance program of about us$1.5 million per year. The Americans, with considerably less at stake in Indonesia than Australia are currently spending us$50 million per year to build capacity within the inp.
• Second, Australia should lead an international donor consortium to raise the funds necessary to properly resource the indonesian school education system. We have called this a ‘second colombo plan' for Indonesian education. We have already released details of this and recognise that such a program can only be delivered effectively conjointly with Indonesian education authorities. But unless we do so, we leave unattended some of the recruiting grouds for terrorists for the future.
• Third, we argue for a region summit at heads of government level on terrorism in south east asia. Terrorism experts in the region and beyond tell me that there is insufficient political momentum from the top down to deal with terrorism effectively on the groud across islamic South East Asia. This must happen as a matter of urgency.

These then are Labor's three pillars. Our alliance with the US. Our membership of the un. And our policy of comprehensive engagement with Asia.

For labor they provide a framework for developing alternative policy responses to the raft of global and regional security, economic and humanitarian challenges that confront us all.

But they also represent a different view of australia's place in the region and the world.

One of which we can all be justifiably proud.

Not so many years ago, australia was regarded as a contributor state. The question was invariably asked at any international conference: ‘what are the Australians doing?'

Unfortunately, that time has passed. We are no longer seen as a contributor state. We are seen more and more as a problem state.

I don't believe this is the sort of australia that the people of australia want.