Our Crumbling Institutions

A year ago, Andrew Hastie, the Liberals’ shadow defence minister, described our times as Australia’s ‘most uncertain hour’. It’s a term that applies to more than just the country’s strategic environment. Anthony Albanese’s platitudes this week about multiculturalism are at odds with the reality of anti-Semitism Australia has witnessed since 7 October.

People can live side by side whether they are Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and be enriched by the diversity which is here. I’ve long been of the view that our multiculturalism is a strength not just for ourselves but that we can be a bit of a microcosm for the world, and we can show that diversity is a strength. We can show that justice is possible for people to live side by side.

Albanese doesn’t acknowledge that people can only live ‘side by side’ if they share a common commitment to do so. It’s impossible to reconcile the PM’s ‘diversity is a strength’ sloganeering with the reality of, for example, the University of Melbourne a few days ago cancelling a lecture by a visiting Israeli academic because of the

threat of violence. In the face of intimidation of the mob, our institutions, rather than showing leadership, crumble.

When our institutions are not capitulating to extremists, they’re complaining they’re not loved. On Monday, the chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, Bran Black wrote about ‘business bashing’ in The Australian.

Some nations celebrate their successful businesses, because they see what successful businesses mean for the nation, and the national prosperity they can create.

In contrast, here in Australia we are allowing business to become the permanent punching bag – we need a shift.

True. But in some nations, businesses celebrate their nation. Not in Australia.

More often than not, big business CEOs, if they’re not attacking Australia itself, are attacking what were once celebrations of Australia. Last year, Vicki Brady, Telstra CEO, said she’d be working on Australia Day because 26 January was a ‘painful reminder of discrimination and exclusion’. According to a spokesperson for NAB, the company would in future years consider ‘alternative arrangements’ as a working day for staff because of ‘the distress the date causes’. And, of course, there was Woolworths and its Australia Day debacle.

If big business CEOs want Australians to ‘celebrate’ big business, they need to understand that celebration works both ways. CEOs want the support of the same Australians whose attitudes and beliefs they denigrate. The opinion of the virtue-signalling big business CEOs is not the opinion of mainstream Australians. Mainstream Australians like Australia and like Australia Day. According to a poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs, 87% of Australians are proud to be Australian, 69% believe Australia has a history to be proud of, and 63% think Australia Day should be celebrated on 26 January. These percentages have changed much in the last few years.

Black admitted,

Australian business doesn’t always get it right. Like anyone, businesses can make mistakes, and when they do, they need to make things right.

Big business can begin by making things right with Australians by apologising for its partisan and political role in the Voice debate. Big business CEOs spent shareholders’ money, without shareholders’ approval, on a destructive and divisive campaign to divide Australians by race.

No CEO has yet said sorry or that it won’t happen again.

Next, there’s the crumbling of the confidence and the capability of Australia’s military. This week, the Albanese government appointed Vice Admiral David Johnston as the new chief of the Australian Defence Force. He’s the first head of the ADF from the navy since Chris Barrie in the 1990s. It can only be hoped Johnston has a better grasp of the realities of our most uncertain hour than Barrie appears to have. It’s not a comfort to think people like Barrie once had responsibility for defending Australia.

Barrie was interviewed last year by The Sydney Morning Herald. The piece was headlined ‘China is a fatal distraction: Former Defence Chief on the biggest threat facing Australia’.

We’re sitting at an outside table on a late-spring day Fratelli Paradiso, close to the unit that he [Barrie] and his wife own in nearby Elizabeth Bay. (The couple divide their time between Sydney, a ‘small home’ in Canberra and a holiday house on the Greek island of Kythera, which they visit annually.)

We decide on the hearty agnello (lamb cutlets with a polenta crust, butter beans and salsa verde) for a main course, and so keep our entrée simple: mixed olives and freshly baked rustic bread (dipped in fine olive oil), with a glass of Italian red for the retired admiral.

How does someone who spent 42 years inside one of the country’s most tradition-steeped institutions emerge as a climate campaigner? The synergies are stronger than you might think, he says. ‘Culturally the navy made you think ahead. We used to have a thing called the weather eye, always having an interest in the weather and what might happen and what you might need to do.’

Barrie is disappointed politicians are not taking climate change more seriously. In September Barrie briefed teal MPs (who share his desire for stronger climate change action) in Canberra. They told him they felt resented by the major parties for having ‘disturbed the system’. ‘And I said,’ Well let’s disturb the system even more!’

And what would he be saying to Albanese now if he had the prime minister’s ear? ‘That we have no time now in which to delay getting things done,’ he replies. ‘It has been squandered. Before he died, Will Steffen used to say, ‘In 2030 we will know the answer to extinction or survival.’ I think he was wrong. It will be earlier than 2030, and I think we are starting to see now what I call ‘planet fightback’ in a way that we could not have comprehended 10 years ago.’

I don’t know what ‘planet fightback’ is. Maybe Barrie doesn’t know either.

Here’s Barrie’s conclusion to all of this.

‘Taiwan is a fatal distraction,’ he says over lunch. ‘China is a fatal distraction. Climate change will get us before China.’

Barrie was appointed by John Howard, and from what Peter Jennings, the former executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote this week, it seems Barrie was the best of the mediocre bunch.

It is noteworthy that Johnston, the new chief of the Australian Defence Force, is the first Navy CDF since Admiral Chris Barrie held the position between 1998 and 2002 during John Howard’s government. I was chief of staff to defence minister Ian MacLachlan in 1998.

Barrie got the CDF role on the basis he was the three-star general (as Vice Chief of the ADF) most likely to pick up the phone when MacLachlan called. I encourage you to read that sentence again.

That was a generation ago. If it is possible to believe it, the ADF was even more insular and self-regarding than it is now.

Johnston will replace Angus Campbell, the current chief of the ADF, who is retiring after six years in the role. Malcolm Turnbull appointed Campbell. Michael Shoebridge of Strategic Analysis Australia said this about Campbell this week.

Whatever his personal character and ethics, Campbell is a failed leader across a range of simple objective tests. The Defence Force he led was meant to be growing by about 1,000 people a year since 2017. Instead it has been shrinking. That’s despite the fire hose of taxpayer money flowing into Defence since 2016…

However, the biggest personal leadership failure of Campbell relate to Afghanistan. He was the senior officer in command of Australian forces deployed there from 2011-2012 and received a Distinguished Service Cross for that command. In 2020, when credible evidence emerged from the Brereton Report into the allegations that Australian Special Forces personnel had committed war crimes and murder between 2005 and 2016 – a period that included his command – Campbell faced his leadership moment. And failed…

And yet while calling for honours given to the Special Forces to be revoked, Campbell failed to do what every leader must – to ask nothing of others that you are not willing to do yourself. He kept his own award. No one in the military hierarchy from this time has been held to account.

As a final comment on all of this, I must mention some research from the Commonwealth Parliament Library released last year. It was commissioned by the Greens. It’s damning. This is their press release from 1 December 2023.

MORE GENERALS. FEWER TROOOPS. AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE LEADERSHIP TOPPLES OVER WITH THE WEIGHT OF GOLD BRAID

Figures compiled for the Greens by the Parliamentary Library show a tremendously top-heavy Australian Defence Force with the number of flag officers almost doubling since 2003 from 119 to 219.

This means there is a one star level officer for every 260 full-time uniformed members.  This is way out of whack with comparable militaries around the world. [In the army, an officer with one star is a Brigadier, two stars is a Major General, three stars is a Lieutenant General, and four stars is a General, the highest rank in the Australian Army. The base annual salary of a Brigadier is $270,000, a Major General $294,000, and a Lieutenant General $446,000. These salaries don’t include retirement benefits.]

The most senior level of officers in the ADF with a ‘star rank’, General, Admirals and Air Commodores, have multiplied while enlisted numbers have gone backwards falling from 62,429 in 1983 to 41,079 in 2023.

Senator David Shoebridge, Greens Defence Spokesperson said: ‘When you have so much gold braid and so few troops it feels like a satire, not a military. Senior Defence leadership have failed to meet a single recruiting target for the last decade while they have quietly doubled their senior ranks. This is literally rewarding failure’.

‘It is no wonder the military is struggling to find new recruits when there is this bloated and unaccountable leadership class searching for relevance in a shrinking defence force.’

‘For too long the response from Defence to every national security issue, backed by Liberal and Labor governments, is to stick a star on someone and pump up their paycheck. Every time a new program is announced, there is a rush to appoint a fresh admiral, a new general or a shiny air marshall, and it’s always years before we see a new ship, tank or plane.’

‘If fancy flags kept us safe then Australia would certainly have a world-leading military.’

This, remember, is a press release from the Greens.

The press release goes on. For every senior officer in the Australian Defence Force (one star-ranked or above), there are 260 other officers and enlisted members. This compares to the US military, where the comparable figure is one senior offer to 1,500 other officers and enlisted members, and the UK military, where the figure is one senior officer to 1,200 other personnel. The size of the US military is approximately 1.3 million personnel. If the US military had the same proportion of senior officers to officers and enlisted members as the ADF, the US military would have nearly 5,000 star-ranked officers. It has 863 star-ranked officers. Put another way, the ADF is about one-thirtieth the size of the US military, but its senior officer corps is one-quarter the size of that of the US military.

In the US, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is paid (in Australian dollars) $330,000 per year. In the UK, the Chief of the Defence Staff is paid (in Australian dollars) $530,000.  In Australia, the Chief of the ADF is paid $1,062,702 per year.

Time will tell whether such largesse will secure Australia’s future at this most uncertain hour.

Recommended Reading

This essay was only released on Bari Weiss’s brilliant The Free Press website on Tuesday and it’s already generated headlines. ‘I’ve been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust’ by Uri Berliner.

Here’s how it begins:

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence-educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkley. I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that. [Sarah Lawrence is the name of a renowned, very left-leaning, liberal arts college in New York.]

I found the piece interesting for two reasons. While NPR in America is not exactly analogous to the ABC, there are many parallels. Over my years at the IPA, I got to know many farmers from all around the country who talked to me about how they used to listen to the ABC in the cabin of their header.  They don’t now. So this line from the piece struck a chord – ‘For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon…No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.’

The second reason I enjoyed the piece is that it’s an essay about more than NPR. It’s a thoughtful analysis of journalism and the media in the United States and, by extension, Australia. Matt Taibbi wrote about it today:

Earlier this week on The Free Press, Uri Berliner dropped a bomb on the public media world… Berliner’s piece was immediately swallowed, mangled, and regurgitated as new propaganda. CNN media writer Oliver Darcy wrote, ‘NPR faces right-wing revolt and calls for defunding after editor claims left-wing bias,’ establishing the format that this was not about factual impropriety but about a ‘right-wing revolt’ against a claimed ‘left-wing bias..’ The New York Times did much the same thing, saying ‘NPR is in Turmoil After It is Accused of Left-Wing Bias,’ adding that Berliner’s piece generated a ‘firestorm…especially among conservatives.’

But this wasn’t about ‘bias’. It was about ethics, or a lack of them. But this has been going on for so long that most people have forgotten what ethics looks like… Once someone determined Trump was so bad it was okay to lie about him, it set the precedent that the only thing that mattered was a subject’s politics. If you were on the right side, you got fairness, but if you weren’t, you didn’t. That in turn turned reporters into political judges.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John