Boyer Lectures 2009: A Very Australian Conversation

Introduction

After I got over the shock of the ABC inviting me to be the 2009 Boyer lecturer, I started to digest both the honour and the responsibility of what I had accepted to do. It struck me that while I had had some quite diverse experiences in life, obviously mostly related to my time in uniform, I have always regarded myself as very much an Australian ‘Everyman’ by both background and inclination. Accordingly, I have entitled this Boyer series A Very Australian Conversation.

In the first lecture I will stick close to my knitting and address the subject of national security. In subsequent lectures, I will speak on Australia’s regional relationships, leadership the Australian way, on sociological changes I have observed over my lifetime, and on those great political issues which I think resonate with the Common Man (like me!). I will finish the series by gazing into my personal crystal ball to describe a future which we might aspire to and which will challenge our descendants.

one

National Security at the Breakfast Table?

I’ve spent most of a lifetime puzzling over national security; for much of my forty years in uniform I was learning about it. When I became more senior, I was still learning and also at the same time attempting to explain it to my interested countrymen and women. As a subject area some might think of it as arcane and esoteric but I disagree. It is founded in the informed and intuitive feelings of all Australians who notice their own circumstances. People don’t need to read or study to be secure; they simply believe they are or they don’t!

National security can rarely be seen as an absolute state—it exists as a continuum of cost versus benefit: how much we are prepared to endure or pay or concede or surrender to achieve a particular state of security.

National security can also be conceived to operate on two planes: perceptions of security and security measured empirically or objectively. If armed hostile men are kicking down your front door at home, then your perceptions of insecurity are likely to coincide with your empirically based security. Perceptions meet reality!

There are also, though, two further measures we might apply: first, challenges to our security through affronts solely to our values; and second, physical threats to our safety and sovereignty.

If we organise our thoughts this way on national security questions, it is attractive intellectually, but the reality is always more complex and frustrating. There are always going to be nuanced cases we could discuss such as illegal immigration, but that’s not all. For example, using this logical approach I can mount a case that the Asian tsunami in late 2004 had security implications for Australia. Indeed, many would argue so does severe climate-change effects in our region. You would find more than a few people who would even raise the security aspects of severe social issues in our remote indigenous communities.

All good debating stuff! But let’s be more pragmatic!

There is no greater nor more grave responsibility for the Australian government than providing for our national security. By and large this responsibility has always been met very well, often with only murmured help from the generals! The government is routinely entrusted with overseeing and from time to time defining the national interest, and acting effectively and promptly to protect it or promote it. The people always demand to know the principles and the broad plans of any new action to foster national security. Policy—that great and cherished term of countless generations of bureaucrats—applies to our national security but it really comes down to ‘Where do we stand on such and such, and how will we do such and such?’

When we speak about the ‘where do we stand’ aspect of our future national security, government has a dilemma: how do we describe the threats and pressures the government foresees in the future? Nobody has a crystal ball. Nostradamus hasn’t taken a seat in the federal parliament. We look forward twenty to thirty years in these national security policy documents; pointing to specific, future threats can be limiting and damaging in near term relationships and even be self-fulfilling in the longer term. We wouldn’t stand at our front fence and yell out to a neighbour, ‘We’re getting on okay now but I might have to fight you some time later!’ Australians accept this deliberate generality in our articulation of where we stand.

There are however some durable characteristics to our security environment in the opaque future. First, we will still be a profound and engaged ally of the United States (and implicitly that fact accepts the risks as well as the advantages of alliance); and second, that the defence forces in our region will continue to modernise and in some (as yet unknown) cases in all likelihood will dramatically expand. Last, many nations in our region will look to us for comfort, support, leadership and protection—all this due to our proximity, our reputation, our relationships and our capabilities. All of these are realities now and will continue to be so. But the cost of this is immense! Every person who rails against the huge expense of a modern national security policy is perfectly correct—the costs are obscene. The only alternative is to wish away war—from everywhere, of course, but especially from our own land, our own shores, our own neighbourhood.

When a hundred years ago local fire brigades changed from horse-drawn to motorised appliances, many people were aghast at the cost but didn’t quibble if it meant that they were safer. Fundamentally, Australians accept that there is no ‘cheap’ form of defence: cheap defence equals high risk and low comfort.

Governments in Australia can go forward confident that ordinary Australians implicitly accept that the future is uncertain, it cannot and sometimes should not be predicted, but that in security terms the nation must move with the times.

The US alliance, which we call ANZUS, is a centrepiece of our national security. Most alliances come down to a process of ‘bonding or balancing or bandwagoning’. As part of the British empire in World War I, it might be said that, even lacking a formal alliance, Australia was committed to following the ‘mother country’—Britain—into her European war. Our familial bonds drew us inevitably and quickly into that war at the other side of the world.

I notice some attention has been given recently to the thesis that our political leaders of the day believed that it was in Australia’s high self-interest to respond so readily to the British declaration of war in 1914, not just because of familial bonds, but in effect to ensure that Australia retained a still-powerful Britain as a major