This is great read.
Hilariously comical.
Peter Hatcher, Sydney Morning Herald talks about the submarines debacle.
Morrison, the third amigo, speaks loudly to Xi.
Beijing decided to break Australia’s will. It imposed trade bans on more than $20 billion worth of exports last year and published a list of 14 demands on Australia’s sovereignty. Australia’s reply was delivered this week. In co-ordinated appearances by Scott Morrison, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, Australia elevated its relationships with the US and Britain to pool their efforts on the most important next-generation warfighting technologies. This so-called “trilateral security partnership” is to be known as AUKUS.
In some ways this was mildly comical. The Dad’s Army Anglophone allies who fought together in World War II getting back together for one more fight,
led by an American President who forgot Scott Morrison’s name at the critical moment – “that fella down under”, he improvised, “I appreciate you, pal” – in their joint video appearance on Thursday.
The three amigos – an Aussie marketing huckster, an English buffoon and an American senior citizen. Fresh from being chased out of Afghanistan and humiliated by barbarian terrorists they’d set out to defeat 20 years earlier. Their marquee initiative – for Washington and London to supply nuclear propulsion technology for Australian submarines – is serious. But Canberra has no ability to make use of it in a deployable submarine for at least another 20 years. What’s the point of giving an engine to someone without a car?
In embracing AUKUS, Australia tore up its $90 billion deal with France for the supply of 12 conventionally powered submarines. Meaning that, from Thursday, Australia has no arrangements with anyone to supply any new submarines whatsoever.
China has 66 submarines. It’s expected to have 10 more by 2030. Six of those new boats will be nuclear-powered, according to the US Office of Naval Intelligence. In the time it takes China to build 10 new submarines, Australia will be taking delivery of exactly none.
Australia plans to keep patching up the same six Collins-class subs that it had a quarter-century earlier, the same ones first commissioned by the Hawke government.
The chronic Aussie fumbling of new submarine acquisition would be comical if it weren’t for the national vulnerability it has created. First Labor bungled it. In 2009 Kevin Rudd announced plans to acquire 12 new subs. Julia Gillard tore up the plans.
Then the Liberals took their turn. Tony Abbott flirted with Japan before Malcolm Turnbull dumped it. Turnbull married France before Morrison divorced it. Now Morrison is going home to mum and dad’s place.
It will take years longer, the government said this week, to get the new nuclear-powered subs into the water and cost more than to proceed with the French-designed subs. All up, between Labor and the Libs, a dozen years and billions of dollars wasted. And another 20 years or more before the first nuclear sub arrives, all going well, which it never does.
“These subs will not be relevant to the strategic contest that AUKUS is designed to address,” says the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings. In other words, by the time these nuclear submarines begin to arrive, the contest likely will have been decided.
But while Morrison has joined with the US and Britain to defend liberty and democracy from threats abroad, the Prime Minister also has a duty to defend liberty and democracy at home. As the last US election proved, even a great democracy is at risk of sudden collapse as a result of internal dangers. A people’s trust in democracy, confidence in governance and faith in institutions is the invisible essence of a democracy.
Australia cannot assume the permanence of any of these things. The Australian people already are suspicious of the federal government’s sclerotic movement towards creating a national anti-corruption body, a federal ICAC. The Morrison government has shown repeated failures of good governance. The sports rorts affair and the car-pork outrage are examples of a brazen abuse of power, perversions of the proper use of taxpayer money for partisan purposes.
With just this sort of abuse in mind, Sydney University professor of constitutional law Anne Twomey recently remarked that “the corrosion of the rule of law and the seeding of future corruption are profoundly worrying. We are being set on a trajectory with horrific ends. Yet our own leaders cannot see beyond the immediate glittering prize of the next election.”
And the waste of billions in JobKeeper payments feeds the public’s resentment of a system that seems loaded in favour of the rich and powerful and overlooks the needy and powerless.
Today’s test of Morrison’s probity is the case of Christian Porter, round two. Porter already was politically damaged by the historic allegation against him of rape, which he denies. Morrison decided to protect him nonetheless and moved him from attorney-general to Industry Minister.
This week Porter showed profound misjudgment and stunning arrogance in disclosing that he’d been given up to $1 million by anonymous supporters to help pay his legal bills. He claimed this was a “blind trust”. But it is not. A blind trust is when you put your own money into a vehicle under the control of named trustees who deploy the money at arm’s length from the owner. This avoids conflict of interest. But the money given to Porter is not his own.
“The form of his disclosure effectively makes a mockery of the purpose of the Register of Members’ Interests, which exists to place on the public record members’ interests which may conflict – or be seen to conflict – with their public duty,” the former NSW Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy says. “If the source of the payment to Porter is unknown, how can the potential for conflict with his public duty possibly be known?”
Morrison has asked his departmental secretary, Phil Gaetjens, to examine this so-called Legal Services Trust to see if it is consistent with the code of ministerial standards. If they accept that a minister of the crown can benefit from an anonymous slush fund, they will confirm that Australia has no ministerial standards.
Is Morrison serious about defending democracy? If so, he will defend it against internal dangers as well
Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
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