First, there was an open split among senior ministers on whether the security-driven ban on Huawei, the giant Chinese telecommunications company, bidding for contracts to deliver Australia’s National Broadband Network, should be lifted until Prime Minister Abbott closed the debate down and confirmed the ban which had been imposed by the previous government. That has incurred the mild ire of Beijing but complicates the development of Australia’s relationship with China more broadly.
Now, Australia is embroiled in a major stoush with Indonesia, another strategic partner in Asia, because of its flat-footed response to the revelation that it had been spying on Indonesia’s top leaders. Totally unnecessarily, Prime Minister Abbott has taken retrospective ownership of that responsibility.
This is a serious crisis in trust that has been allowed to spiral out of control, corroding developing relations between the two countries and destroying valued diplomatic and security assets that had been carefully built up over a number of years. Again, the responsibility for the intelligence initiative at the source of this problem rests with the former government, though not how it has now been allowed to play out.
Both incidents prompt many questions. It’s disturbing to be asked by top regional officials, for example, whether Australia’s spies are out of control and negligent of Australia’s national interests. Certainly, in this context, it is important to know that whoever instigated the Indonesian escapade was properly charged with exercising responsibility over the calculation of its benefits and costs to the national security interest.
These incidents could be viewed as unrelated diplomatic snafus by a newly elected government that is understandably still finding its feet. They are not. Rather they are symptomatic of deeper currents that resist thinking beyond the box about the rapidly evolving structure of Australia’s economic, political and security circumstance.
Both the Huawei ban and the Indonesian spy case provide stark illustrations of the failure to resolve the question of reconciling the importance of the strategic trust that is fundamental to Australia’s national interest in Washington with the strategic trust that is fundamental to its national interests in Jakarta, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and the other capitals in its neighbourhood.
Thoughtless, instinctive appeal to the old norms of the embedded security relationship with the United States will no longer suffice, either for Canberra or for Washington. Indeed, for Washington, reliance on them will make Australia an increasingly burdensome ally in Asia and the Pacific. The sad truth is that the events of these past few weeks need not have been managed in this way, diminishing Australia’s national and allied security assets in its region.
On the evidence of careless statements about Japan (Australia’s ‘best friend in Asia’) that have deeply offended Korean sensibilities, the absence of face-saving affirmation of straight-dealing with Indonesia’s leaders in the aftermath of the spying scandal, and the conflicting signals about the acceptability of China’s telecommunications giant, Huawei, with the negative implications for relations with China, the present political assumption appears to be that nothing has changed in the past 60 years. Australia needs to think again, and to think beyond old boxes.
In this week’s lead essay, the impeccably credentialed Claude Barfield, from the American Enterprise Institute, calls the abrupt decision of the Abbott government to swat down Huawei’s ambitions to participate in the rollout of the Australian National Broadband Network ‘a stunning example of diplomatic ineptitude’. Barfield’s language is gentlemanly.
Barfield suggests that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation seems to have been guided by the much-publicised conclusions of the US House Intelligence Committee, which recommended that Huawei be banned from US contracts as a top security risk. The problem now is that the Edward Snowden leaks document that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has actually accomplished all of the espionage tasks cited as possible for Huawei and the Chinese government.
Germane to the Indonesian spy scandal, Barfield notes that ‘Australia is a member of the so-called Five Eyes — with the United States, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand. Under longstanding security arrangements, these countries have agreed to certain rules regarding spying among themselves; and their security agencies have close ties, even dividing up geographic surveillance’. To have American ex-officials implicitly confirm Australian compliance requirements in public adds insult to injury.
On Huawei, these partners are clearly at odds, says Barfield. ‘Snowden’s revelations demonstrate that the British intelligence agency, GCHQ, and the NSA have often collaborated in specific cyber operations’ he argues. ‘Yet the British have welcomed Huawei, and the government has given its blessing to jointly operated cyber-security facilities with the company. Similarly, New Zealand has allowed Huawei contracts in some of the backbone sectors. The point is that, though sharing much of the same secret information, the security agencies of the five countries have come to dramatically different conclusions about the Huawei security risk’.
‘A final irony’, writes Barfield, ‘is that Australia awarded large NBN contracts to French-based Alcatel-Lucent. Alcatel in turn owns 50 per cent of the Chinese-based Shanghai Bell, from which it will undoubtedly source much of the equipment for the Australian project … [T]he truth is that all of the major “backbone” suppliers, including Ericsson and Cisco, source parts, components and whole systems from Chinese factories. So in the end, the question remains: just how much more secure is Australia or any other country after excluding Huawei?’ Is the Huawei ban more about global economic competition, and old fashioned protectionism at the behest of an alliance partner, than security competition?
Whichever way, Australia has much work to do in digging itself out from the hole in which it has needlessly buried itself on at least these two fronts.
The truth is that if the Huawei ban was lifted, Australian intelligence agencies will be able to develop a better working partnership to build a truly hack-proof system.
The onus on Huawei would also be commensurately greater than that of any other telecommunications equipment suppliers to ensure that their systems are inviolable and devoid of hidden or seeded surveillance features. How much better for our intel to work to verify this in concert with Huawei’s engineers and architects than to simply avoid doing so on the basis of unjustified fears.
A collateral advantage would have been pressure for our agencies to indigenously develop, adapt and modernise our cyber-protective strategies and methodologies to the cutting-edge frontier level of such technologies. Huawei could have been invited to help fund such research as an incentive.
It seems unlikely that Prime Minister Abbott will be able to restore a relationship of trust with SBY. The Indonesian president has always been hyper-sensitive to domestic criticism and often harsh in responding to it, despite his long tenure in office and the lavish praise he has received from, among others, Australian politicians and commentators apparently content to forget that he has been the only Indonesian president ever to have withdrawn an ambassador (now two ambassadors) from Canberra. SBY recently announced, for example, the imminent appearance of a memoir he has penned which will, inter alia, respond to the ‘slanders’ to which he claims to have been subject. SBY has reacted to the Snowden revelations and the Prime Minister’s unfortunate response in the same way that he has reacted to domestic criticism. Now nothing angered Soeharto more than criticism of his wife, the very commercially-minded Tien. She was dubbed ‘tien (ten in Dutch) per cent’ early in the Soeharto era and was later attacked for her Indonesia Mini project. Popular protests against that initiative of hers drew the most vehement reactions from Soeharto. Similarly, seeing his wife’s name on the list of Indonesians whose phones were allegedly tapped will probably have enraged SBY as much as any criticism of her might have done. SBY is probably even more dependent on Ani than Soeharto was on Tien. Ani’s mother still lives, if my information is correct, at SBY’s private residence in Cikeas and is referred to privately, though never publicly, as ‘the Queen Mother’ by critics of SBY. It was a mistake for the Prime Minister to visit Indonesia so soon after his victory when the Indonesians had not had time to forget the silly and Indonesian sovereignty-violating initiatives on buying old fishing-boats and so on dreamed up during the campaign. It was another mistake for Mr Abbott to declare, echoing Mr Keating, that Indonesia is the most important country for Australia, a dumb statement that Indonesians will never make about Australia and which was more or less contradicted by the equally gauche description of Japan as ‘our best friend in Asia’. It will probably be yet another mistake if the Prime Minister seeks to visit Indonesia during SBY’s last months in office. Let’s wait until there is a new president.