Transcript

(This transcript is partly AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)

George Brandis

Ministers are very conscious of the gravity of the decisions they have to make. And this is another dimension in which the politics of national security policy making are a little different. There is an awareness that this is a shared responsibility. There is a conscious striving to be bipartisan. And I don't think the public sees that.

National Security Podcast

You're listening to the National Security Podcast, the show that brings you expert analysis, insights and opinion on the national security challenges facing Australia and the Indo-Pacific. Produced by the ANU National Security College.

David Andrews

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm David Andrews, Senior Policy Advisor at the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to the elders past and present. Today I'm joined by Professor of the Honourable George Brandis KC for conversation on the politics of national security decision making. George Brandis joined ANU in June, 2022 as a professor in the practice of national security, policy and law in a joint appointment with the National Security College and the ANU College of Law. He was the Senator for Queensland from 2000 till 2018 and served as a minister in the governments of John Howard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, including as attorney general between 2013 and 2017. Upon retiring from parliament in 2018, he became Australia's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, serving for four years until May, 2022. George, welcome to the podcast.

George Brandis

Good to be with you, David.

David Andrews

Well, I thought as the title suggests that in this conversation, we'd talk a little bit about the politics of national security decision-making. I think we spend a lot of time talking about national security, not just on the podcast, but in general, and the factors that shape it. Often the focus tends to be on larger impersonal forces or on international actors, on levels of defence capability, those sort of things. At the same time, I think we run the risk of looking over or looking past the political dimensions of national security. This is possibly one of those overused quotes that's out there, but to refer to the Klasovitian dictum of warfare being politics by other means, I would contend that we probably put too much emphasis at the moment on the war side and not enough on the politics as one of those key shaping factors. So with that in mind, I thought it would be great to have you on the podcast and to reflect on your experience as a decision maker in the Australian national security context, both as a minister and as a high commissioner and sort of rounding that full conversation together. So to start the conversation, I guess, I'd like to get your inputs or your sense of that proposition. What do you see as being the relationship between national security and broader politics?

George Brandis

Well, I think the most important point to make, David, is that as in other areas of policy in a democratic system, the ultimate decisions are made by politicians. But unlike other aspects of public policy, whether it be social policy or economic policy or, or other areas of policy. The number of actual political decision makers engaged in national security decisions is actually very few. Ultimately, it is the ministers who comprise the National Security Committee of Cabinet. But in a broader parliamentary and political context, one thing that is quite different about the politics of national security decision making is it engages relatively fewer political actors. And there are reasons for that. But I think the most important reason is because it's not a kitchen table issue. I mean, the public has an expectation that the country will be kept safe unless the government is manifestly failing to do that. It's not an issue that troubles the man and woman in the street terribly much. It's not the sort of issue that a practicing politician, for example, is often contacted about in their electorate office. and there have been Australian elections in which national security issues have been very important, but they're quite few and far between. The decisive electoral issues are usually social issues and economic issues rather than national security issues. Now the converse of that is that because relatively few politicians are the ultimate decision makers in the national security policy making area, those who are engaged in it tend to become very specialized in it. So you have a small subset of the political class, or of practicing politicians I should say, all of them quite senior politicians who have developed a reasonably deep expertise in the field.

David Andrews

As you say, it's probably a difficult sell to the average voter to say, I want you to vote for me to be your member to actually focus on international issues or issues outside of the electorate. So it's a difficult value proposition. I don't know how much time will tell the extent to which this has an effect on electoral politics in Australia, but we're certainly seeing I think maybe a heightened focus on some aspects of foreign policy and national security at the moment with regard to the situation in Israel and the conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah.

George Brandis

That's true. In a sense, that's one of the exceptions that proves the rule. The conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah has an immediate effect on very specific social groups in Australia in both the Islamic community and the Jewish community. And those groups are very valuable. And in the case of the Islamic community, they're strategically important because most of that community is highly localised in certain electorates, particularly in Western Sydney. And the Jewish community has always traditionally been a very influential community in Australian society and in Australian business and politics for many years. Here you have an example of an international issue that immediately impinges on strategically critical – to strategically critical Australian communities. But that's very unusual.

David Andrews

One other sort of, I might say, technical dimension that I'm interested in is the you might say the actual nature of ministerial responsibility and accountability. And I think we're getting quite technical in that I suppose, but when it comes down to it, requirements or obligations are vested in ministers as opposed to regular members of parliament or people on committees or special envoys or what have you. Could you maybe elaborate on, is that the special nature of what it means to be a minister running a portfolio with that sort of financial accountability that comes with it as well as the electoral side?

George Brandis

Well, I mean, ministers, whether it be the foreign minister or the defence minister or the attorney general, as was the case when I was the attorney responsible for domestic national security, are very conscious of the gravity of the decisions they have to make. And this is another dimension in which the politics of national security policy making are a little different. Because between the alternative parties of government, the coalition and the Labor Party, there is an awareness that this is a shared responsibility. So there tends to be somewhat less partisanship in the debate. The tone of the debate is often different. There is a conscious striving not always obvious in parliamentary debate, but certainly obvious in parliamentary committees like the intelligence and security community to be bipartisan. I don't think the public sees that.

David Andrews

I think there can sometimes be a criticism in the public that bipartisanship is sort of a convenient fig leaf, you might say, to...to either keep other parties out of that decision-making process or to sort of make out that both, say, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party are effectively in this same sort of homogenous can rebubble type outlook. I would assume you don't think that's a fair characterisation, but what – are there downsides?

George Brandis

I can understand the characterisation, but it is a feature of our system of government that the government of the day is the decision maker in this area as in others, but there are huge swathes of foreign policy and national security decision making, particularly in diplomacy and in relation to defence, which don't require legislation or parliamentary sanction and therefore are more peculiarly the province of the executive government than other areas of public policy. That's not to say that there isn't parliamentary debate about consequential decisions. But in terms of the balance of power between the executive government and the parliament, when it comes to national security decision making, that balance is more weighted towards the executive government than in other areas of public policy. And it is true that the alternative parties of government know one another to be the past and future decision makers in this area in a way that for example the Senate crossbenchers or the Teals and the House of Representatives are never going to be. So they may be voices, often voices of criticism, but they are not part of the decision making either as a government or as influential over the decision making as an opposition.

David Andrews

Continuing on that theme of bipartisanship and I think going back to your previous comments around how this isn't often a decisive factor in elections, could one say that it may not win you an election but it can lose you one? Because I think of sort of the conversations maybe more around of the tamper and people smuggling things in the early 2000s…

George Brandis

I think that's often... Look, think David, you're right. I don't think that's unique about national security decision making though. I mean, any bad call, a seriously bad call can make a difference to the outcome of an election. But I think there is a view that when Kim Beazley was the leader of the opposition, he got the politics of border security and the Tampa completely wrong. And that that did come at a political cost to him. John Howard's famous and very – this is a slogan that really grabbed public opinion: “We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come.” It's a very long slogan, but it so perfectly captured the public mood which Beazley had missed and it enabled Howard to do particularly well. Was it the 2004 election? No, the 2001 election, I'm sorry.

David Andrews

This is maybe zooming out a little bit and applies further than just the national security space. But one thing I feel I've seen a lot of commentary about over some years now is the sense in which a lot of the membership base of political parties in Australia is smaller than it has been for long time. But at the same time, we have a lot more commentary and journalism about politics, which strikes me as a bit of a paradox in some way.

George Brandis

That’s a good point. I mean, there are more, more observers and commentators, especially in social media, and fewer and fewer actual participants. Now that just reflects the changing nature of the relationship between the media and society and the massive expansion of the opportunities to participate in public discussion that social media has created. But conversely, as you rightly point out, membership of political parties is falling. They used to be community-based organisations. In the middle of the last century, for example, the party membership of the then newly created Liberal Party and the Australian Labor Party was a fairly substantial percentage of the overall population. The only glimpse we still have of that among the big parties in Australia is the National Party, who are still to a degree a reasonably mass-based community organization in provincial towns and cities. And that reflects the structure of provincial towns and cities. But in the capital cities, the membership of both the Liberal Party and the Labour Party is tiny. I mean it's a bit harder to make that judgment at the Labour Party because there is this apparatus of the trade union movement and although trade unionism has also fallen sharply, there are still a lot of people who members of trade unions. There are not many Labour Party branch members who are not trade unions though, just as there are not many Liberal Party branch members. I think the total membership of the Liberal Party across the country these days is probably around about 50,000 people, if that.

David Andrews

One interesting – maybe not counterexample, but you spoke before that there are certain limitations on what deals and independence and cross-benches their access to or involvement in the process looks like. But then I think we've also seen in the last few years a big uptick in the presence of these independence of community-based groups, which maybe sort of runs contrary to this membership point, is they're not necessarily people aren't joining the broad parties, but they're still being very engaged at a community level. But if the electorate continues to sort of head down those lines and fragment a bit, and you have very localised of decision-making bodies or influence groups that then don't have that bigger systemic involvement in the way that the major parties currently do, do you think there'll need to be any adjustment in the way that these systems operate or will that just be a sort natural evolution of the makeup of the parliament?

George Brandis

I think the latter. I don't think – I mean we have an unusually large number of independents. I think this is the biggest House of Representatives crossbench in Australian history at the moment. Whether that continues or whether the teal phenomenon was a flash in the pan, I think it's too early to say. But I don't think there is -  although it's statistically obvious that a smaller percentage of the total electorate are people who identify with either of the alternative parties of government and a larger proportion of the electorate vote for independents or minor parties, I think structurally the dichotomy between the government and the opposition will continue always to be the main dynamic of politics and the government and the opposition are the two parties of government and that's not going to change.

David Andrews

This is a much smaller level but just as a point of comparison I think we have in the ACT, we have at least for the last term of government, a Labour Greens coalition which is a unique context.

George Brandis

And there’s been one in Tasmania too in years gone by but I don't think that that is going to be a phenomenon in Australian politics in the foreseeable future. That's not to say, as we saw during the Gillard period, there mightn't be a minority Labour government or supported by Teals or Greens or a minority Liberal government supported by other independents or minor party members. But I think that is going to occur in reasonably unusual circumstances. I don't think there is a fundamental structural change underway.

David Andrews

No, I think the point that I find interesting about the ACT example is that it feels like, at least from some of the reporting of the way that the Greens MLAs talk, is that they are almost stuck in this how to be part of the government but not necessarily being fully on board with the agenda. it's almost a sort of not – but they're not in opposition and they're not in government. It's an interesting kind of blend that think some of their membership and representatives feel. But just as an interesting example, that's all.

George Brandis

Well, look, David, I profess no expertise whatsoever on ACT politics, but I will make this observation. If you were going to identify one part of Australia whose politics are least predictive of the way the rest of Australia would behave, it's the ACT.

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David Andrews

When we talk about policy making, not just in national security but in government, I think sometimes there can be a sense in which the objectively best, most well thought out, most well planned policy outcome will be the one that will be naturally delivered because everyone will see the light of this piece of policy and get on board when I think we know in reality that's not both how policy is developed or how it's implemented. And so in terms of other drivers that shape that decision-making process or that analytical process, what kind of a role do you see or maybe an influence perhaps more than a role of the different politicians and parties’ sense of history, whether that's personal or collective?

George Brandis

I'm sorry to say not very much. I mean, one thing that really struck me as a big difference between Australian politics and UK politics when I was in the United Kingdom is how much on both sides of history is both a guide and also sometimes a burden. So much more in the United Kingdom than in Australia. Political debate takes place in the context and with conscious reference to history. Now we don't do that here in Australia probably because we are a young nation. I mean, Federation was only, only occurred 123 years ago. Partly because Australia is I think a more future-focused nation because it's a young nation. So I do not think that history plays a very big role as a conscious influencer of political discussion. Now I’m not saying that's a good thing by the way but I think that's just the way it is.

 

 

David Andrews

I think we often see whether in the UK or the US or other comparable context, often there's sort of a series of articles in the weeks following an election of who's moved which busts into which offices or taking down which portraits and things. I'm sure there's an element of that that exists in the Australian context, but it does feel somewhat removed from that minutiae. But think we then do see, and something that I've been struck by in the conversations around AUKUS, for example, is the way in which some of the people, let's say the older statesmen of the Labour Party like Mr Keating and Mr Carr who have raised their objections from outside of the parliament have often couched their objections in these quite historical narrative based terms in-

George Brandis

Yeah, I think, and I don't want to reflect upon the motives of Mr Keating and Mr Carr, but I'll keep those views to myself. I think you're right in the observation that they have invoked history and I think generally the Labor Party tends to be more conscious of its own history, a lot of it I have to say mythologised, than the non-Labor side of politics and that's partly because the Labor Party is a lot older. I mean the Liberal Party was created in 1944. The Australian Labor Party was created essentially in the 1890s. So it has a long comets tale of history. But I think psychologically as well, the Labor Party sees itself as a movement and it more often references its own somewhat mythologised history than the Liberal Party does. And to me, who's a person who's deeply interested in history, that's a source of frustration.

David Andrews

To those sort of cultures, they say if, the Liberal Party views itself as more of a movement and maybe a more managerial side to parts of the Liberal Party. Do those kind of cultures or trends, do they shape or affect the decisions that are made or is it more just something that's in the –

George Brandis

Not in any obvious way. Not in any obvious way, but I think they sometimes influence, if only at a rhetorical level, the way in which the arguments are put.

David Andrews

I thought I might move on to a couple of, let's say, case studies for want of a better word here. Probably one of the most prominent ones that you were involved in in recent memory was in the buildup to the establishment of the Department of Home Affairs and with that the movement of the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation from the Attorney General's portfolio into this new Home Affairs portfolio. Obviously there's been a little bit of movement since that the Labor government have moved. The machinery government has shifted those entities around again, but I understand that there was some disagreement through the cabinet process of what was the best shape or form of Home Affairs and where these places sat. Is that… Are those processes shaped by fundamentally the briefing you receive and then the assessments you make of that or is it people with different personal philosophies on security and government and how do those things interrelate to shaping that cabinet decision?

George Brandis

Well, it's not binary like that. To what extent those two different types or modes of decision-making or influences are important depends upon the particular issue. In the case of the creation of the Department of Home Affairs in 2017, it was very much the latter. It was very much a view that was taken by some that from a structural point of view, this was a good idea. The Department of Home Affairs was the creation of Mike Pezzullo, who had been the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. And he had a very strong view that a more powerful department with much more extensive powers and reach was desirable. He tried to persuade Prime Minister Abbott to that view, but Tony Abbott was not persuaded. After Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, Mr. Pezzullo re-litigated the issue with Mr Turnbull and there were some in PM &C who shared Pezzullo’s view. At a political level, there was an element of this, of Malcolm trying to appease the right wing of the Liberal Party and in particular Peter Dutton, who was Pezzullo’s minister at the time. So there was a combination of bureaucratic ambition and political ambition in convergence, which led ultimately to that decision. Now, my view was very heavily influenced by the agencies, particularly ASIO, but also the Australian Federal Police, who were vehemently opposed to it. The then Director General of Security, Duncan Lewis, was absolutely vehement in his opposition to it. And I took the view that it was not a good way of making decisions to disregard the advice of the heads of the national security agencies in order to appease what was essentially a bureaucratic and political power grab. So I think the Department of Home Affairs was a solution in search of a problem. There was no evident gap in the coverage by the national security departments and agencies before the Department of Home Affairs was created. I'm glad that Prime Minister Albanese has returned now both the Australian Federal Police and a— and ASIO to the jurisdiction of the Attorney General's Department because that model worked very well for 70 years. In a way, the Department of Home Affairs has now been unmoored because it still has policy responsibility for domestic national security, but it doesn't have the national security agencies within its portfolio. I think it's an open question how that plainly anomalous allocation of responsibilities is resolved.

David Andrews

The other obvious, as I say, case study, let's stick with that, that, is reflecting on your time as High Commissioner in London. Decision making takes place by ambassadors and High Commissioners all around the world on any given day in different ways, is again, it's individuals making decisions within frameworks. But we also have a number of people like yourself who were previously members of parliament or senators and have since been appointed to these heads of mission positions around the world. Now, opinions may differ on the merits or otherwise. I think there's a very strong case to be made for  places like London or Washington, there being a clear benefit and you've spoken I think before around the strength that say Joe Hockey brought as well in conversations with Trump and I'm sure also from your time in London, from your experience there. So could you reflect a little bit on sort being on the other side of the process of sort of still making decisions that affect national security but at a maybe more limited space and with a different part of the system.

George Brandis

Well, as a head of mission, you are not a decision maker in relation to any particularly big decisions. You're a representative and an advocate. So in that sense, it's quite a different role. But there's no question that where the head of mission has seen your political experience, you have somewhat more autonomy. Now, because you have been in the recent past a major political player yourself and there are some things that someone in that position can do that a professional diplomat simply can't. Joe Hockey, when he was the ambassador in Washington, hit it off with Donald Trump, just in a personal way. The chemistry was terrific. And I've heard Joe's war stories and anecdotes about his time with Trump. No professional public servant could have done that, could or indeed should have had the intimacy with Trump that Hockey did. But because of that intimacy, he was able to get results for Australia that a senior diplomat wouldn't have been able to get. In London, during my time there was a conservative government. I came to know most of the ministers, including the Prime Minister well. I had a good relationship with my Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and that was known to the Brits. What they wanted, just as in Washington, what they wanted was to know that Australia's head of mission was somebody who could just pick up the phone to the Prime Minister. And they were dealing with somebody who was close to the seat of power. That works in like-minded countries which understand each other well, of which the United States and Britain are the two best examples. It wouldn't, in my view, particularly work, with countries where the relationships are naturally more formal and rigidified. So the case for senior politicians going on to be the heads of mission in like-minded countries which understand each other's systems and deal with each other cooperatively and in more intimate way is I think quite specific to those countries. But in those countries, there's no doubt in my mind that it is an asset because you are taken more seriously. You are not just delivering messages or advocating on behalf of your government. You are actually working the politics of the system to get the best results for your government. You are, developing relationships with politicians and there is a certain camaraderie between senior politicians and I include in that recent ex-senior politicians, particularly from the same side of politics. So I think the test is a pragmatic test, whatever works best and in some circumstances in very like-minded and familiar countries. Having, as the head of mission, somebody who's been a senior player in their own country's politics and is known to have the confidence and intimacy of their own government, which a professional diplomat is never going to have, certainly not the intimacy, is an asset.

David Andrews

Now, George, we've been talking about the politics of national security decision making today. And as we conclude our conversation, I think one question I wanted to pose to you is that some people will advocate for a more explicit separation between politics and national security. Do you think that is actually possible or indeed desirable?

George Brandis

In a sense, everything is political. I mean, that's what politics is. I mean, politics is the management and decision-making and operation of the functioning of a political community. And in a democracy, everybody, even if their level of involvement is as limited as going along to vote, has a degree of involvement. Even in authoritarian and dictatorial systems, the decision makers are still political decision makers and they are subject to the natural constraints and nature of politics. I think it was Lenin in fact who – this may be apocryphal but was said to have remarked to a person who claimed not to be interested in politics. You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you. Politics shouldn't have a bad name any more than the word community should have a bad name because politics is ultimately the making of decisions and the conduct of affairs of a public character within a community.

David Andrews

George Brandis, thank you so much for being on the National Security Podcast.

George Brandis

Good to talk to you, David.

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