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Integrating Australia’s security and economic policy cultures

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US President Donald Trump participates in a tour and plant opening with Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Pratt Industries Chairman Anthony Pratt at a Pratt Industries facility in Wapakoneta, Ohio, United States, 22 September 2019 (Photo: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst).

In Brief

The debate in Australia about China is intensifying and some of the optimism of a decade ago has dissipated. This is in part a result of Chinese actions, particularly concerning security, but also a result of shifts in US trade and economic policy towards China. Despite plenty of warning that China would become a major strategic and policy challenge, Australia is struggling to develop a framework that integrates different strands of policy to guide decision-making related to China in coming decades.

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Policy is built on ideas about the world and how it works. A feature of the Australian policy environment is the separation of policy into different domains. In particular, there is a strong separation between economic policy and security policy.

One example is Australian policy towards the United States. Both Coalition and Labor governments have avoided linking the security and economic relationships, particularly in the areas of trade and investment. They have argued that the security relationship should be understood and managed separately from the trade relationship and that neither should be made hostage to the other. With China policy, both governments have also tried to separate security policy from economic policy.

The changing strategic order makes this approach unsustainable, not least because China generally does not operate this way. Much of the debate on China policy is concerned with trying to strike the right balance between Australia’s economic and security interests. Almost every issue concerning China brings these competing imperatives into play. This has been amplified by major shifts in US policy towards China and an increased willingness by the United States to use economic levers to challenge China.

In consequence, the coming decades are likely to witness increasing economic nationalism, greater coercion using economic instruments and reduced confidence in institutions that have underpinned the rules-based international order. In this environment there is a need to develop a strategic policy framework that integrates economics and security.

This is not only an intellectual challenge. It is also an institutional one. The structure of policymaking in Australia does not encourage a conceptual framework that integrates these imperatives. There is little focus on economic considerations from Defence and the Treasury’s contribution to the security debate is negligible. Coordination from the centre is weak, even if the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has worked to bridge the divide. The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper introduced some different ways of thinking about Australia’s strategic environment and the policy instruments available, but this has not yet resulted in significant change in the policymaking culture.

Perhaps the challenge runs deeper. Security and economic policy cultures embody profoundly different ways of thinking about the world. They look at the same environment and see different patterns and forces at play. They may not necessarily agree on what the strategic problems are or their significance and order of importance.

The exercise of power through the use of economic instruments is quite different from the exercise of power using coercive instruments of the state, such as armed forces. Decisions in either sphere will engage different interest groups. Time as both a strategic reality and a resource is viewed differently. Both policy cultures tend towards totalising frameworks, with the result that hubris can lead them to believe that they have the complete solution to almost all problems.

The tools of both economic and security policy are a means to an end. States will use the instruments available to them to seek advantage and will integrate these different instruments to do so — subject to some constraints. China exercises coercive power through the use of economic levers, as well as more traditional means of coercion such as its claims to disputed territories and militarisation in the South China Sea. The United States is using tariff policy to achieve strategic ends in its relations with countries around the world, particularly China.

Australia was able to sustain the separation of these domains because the rules-based order allowed it to. Policy development took place in a strategic order that was stable where either the rules governing that order were generally agreed upon or guaranteed by allied military power. The rules-based order allowed the establishment of institutions through which economic policy could be conducted. This has flowed back into the structure of Australia’s policy environment and the way policymaking is conducted.

Australia has been an active and successful participant in the international system to help build and sustain the rules-based order, but it is entering a time where that order is being challenged. Australia must work to preserve what can be preserved and adapt where change is inevitable. Canberra needs to development conceptual frameworks that integrate different strands of policy to maximise Australia’s capacity to use instruments of national power to pursue national interests.

This suggests the need for a very different policymaking culture and the development of appropriate institutional arrangements to support it. Perhaps a first step might be to establish a new unit in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet that would focus on the geopolitics of economic power in the Indo-Pacific. More than a coordinating role, it would need a mandate to integrate across government, drawing on the strength of existing institutions to lead the development of policies and a supporting institutional culture to meet Australia’s needs in the new strategic order.

Brendan Sargeant is Honorary Professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University.

This article appears in the most recent edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Economics and security’, Vol. 11 No. 4.

One response to “Integrating Australia’s security and economic policy cultures”

  1. An article that resolutely refuses to face the real issues. Australia is in the historically unique position of having a strategic alliance with a fading power, the US, and a trading dependence with a. Rising power, China. The demands of the two are fundamentally incompatible. Debate on the issues that are raised are hampered by the reflexive use of such meaningless phrases as “the rules based international order”. If there were such a thing it might be useful. The real world is however, fundamentally different, and unless and until such time as Australia’s policy makers recognise that reality this country will be doomed to pursued fundamentally incompatible objectives.

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