"The Decline of Australian Foreign Policy" – essay, "The Australian’s Review of Books", 11 October 2000

 

The piece here was one of my earlier ventures into serious Australian political analysis. In it I was trying – some 2 1/2 years after my retirement from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in 1998 - to analyse the causes of what I saw as a decline in the quality of Australian foreign policy since the change of government in March 1996.

This essay reflected my sense of how the 1999 East Timor crisis had been mishandled, in terms of an Australian lack of concern for the lives and property of the East Timorese people. Its writing predated John Howard‘s 2001 border protection war and his "war on terror". But this early analysis of how Howard was already dominating foreign policymaking, and using it as a domestic policy lever to reach out to a conservative Hansonite constituency, was validated by what happened in 2001-2003. TK 22.11.2003

 

"Our man in purgatory"

(alternative title: "The Decline of Australian Foreign Policy"

-by Tony Kevin, in " The Australian’s Review of Books", supplement to The Australian 11 October 2000, page B20 ( Note: This publication has been discontinued):

 

 

Australian foreign policy is in a mess that had its antecedents decades ago, says Tony Kevin.

An effective Australian foreign policy requires an informed and sensitive professional understanding of the interests and values of nations which are not like us, that we may work towards mutual security and benefit in a world of sovereign states. Such knowledge and judgment is beyond the capacity of any single prime minister or foreign minister, no matter how brilliant.

It's clear that the Australian foreign policy-making process has lost its way. It is now producing seriously flawed outcomes: the failure of Australia's pre-referendum diplomacy in East Timor in 1998-99, resulting in avoidable tragic human loss and long-term damage to Australian-Indonesian security relations; a disturbing vagueness about Australia's and the US's reciprocal security obligations under ANZUS in post-Cold War conditions; the lack of any practical strategy for an Australian regional security diplomacy to balance the current Australian defence planning review; a blurred vision of Australian engagement with Asia; insensitive and destabilising policies towards ethnically based unrest in Fiji; the loss of purpose and effectiveness in cultural diplomacy and Radio Australia.

The root cause of such serious policy failure lies not so much in a loss of professional capacity within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), as in the personalisation by Australian prime ministers and foreign ministers of foreign policy making as part of their domestic political agendas. The trend has developed over several decades since Gough Whitlam. It has reached its nadir under John Howard and Alexander Downer.

The failure is systemic. Australian civil society no longer regards foreign policy as an area of government statecraft requiring high specialist skills in identifying, balancing and pursuing Australia's national interests in a complicated world. Rather, foreign policy is seen as little more than the legitimate projection to the world of the outcome of our democratic political process, involving the interplay of political leaders, political parties, interest groups and media. The special expertise of DFAT and its ambassadors and embassies abroad has been progressively cast aside, as part of this ongoing "democratisation'' of Australian foreign policy.

Until our civil society reaffirms the idea that professionalism is a necessary element in an effective foreign policy - that it's not just about projecting our nation's politics and values as interpreted by our current political leaders - Australian governments will go on producing confused and ineffective foreign policies that fail to advance Australian interests in the world.

The balance of power between elected ministers and a permanent, professional civil service has radically changed since the 1970s. There has been a steady decline in public service independence and a corresponding growth in the powers of prime ministers and ministers.

Most Australians welcome this, as a democratic curtailment of the power of non-elected elites. But in emasculating our senior public service, we have lost an important check on the authority of prime ministers. We lack the US alternative of a real balance of power between the elected president and the elected legislature, because our parliaments are controlled by parliamentary majorities, which are themselves subject to tight prime ministerial discipline.

The trend since the 70s towards prime ministerial centralisation of power has profoundly affected how foreign affairs is conducted. Diplomacy used to be about brokering between one's own nation's interests and values and the interests and values of other sovereign nations, to a mutually good outcome. A good diplomat was not just a messenger but also an active and articulate mediator: a person with the vision to see how a zero-sum international game could be converted into a game of mutual benefit, and the communication skills to convey that vision not just to foreign governments but back to his home government as well. Such a view of diplomacy requires a high degree of confidence and autonomy on the part of those who practised it.

Nowadays, such a vision of diplomacy is defunct in Australia. Domestic politics, as judged and manipulated by the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and their counterparts in the Opposition, is the main determinant of Australian foreign policy. Consideration of the interests and values of other countries has become very secondary -- almost eccentric.

Prior to 1996, the dangers in politicisation of foreign policy making were disguised by the high quality of the ministers involved. Under Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and their foreign ministers Andrew Peacock, Bill Hayden and Gareth Evans, Australia had a foreign policy vision and achieved successful outcomes. But DFAT's vigour and self-confidence were already being undermined. Under Howard and Downer, the decline in vision and effectiveness of Australian foreign policy making is painfully evident.

By 1970, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) had reached a level of professional performance, as measured by outcomes, which it sustained until the mid 90s. Throughout these decades, Australia ``punched above its weight'' in the UN, in ASEAN and Asia-Pacific regional forums, in Western alliance strategic discussions, and in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. DFA advanced Australia's interests abroad. Ministers and parliamentarians respected and drew on its expertise.

During the long Coalition hegemony from 1949 to 1972, and then under Labor and Coalition governments until 1996, DFA worked with its ministers to strengthen Australia's engagement with the Asia-Pacific region. The Colombo Plan of the 50s had been the foundation stone of a generous bipartisan vision of global and regional engagement that flourished in ensuing decades, as seen in: Australia's productive terms of duty on the UN Security Council; our active support for ASEAN, APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum; our huge contribution to the 1993 Cambodia peace settlement; and the rebuilding of Australian-Indonesian relations from their low in 1986 to their high in 1993.

The professionalism of Australia's ambassadors abroad was widely admired. Already by the 70s, our foreign service professionals had developed a distinctive stature and Australian style. Their pride in representing Australia abroad was manifest. Their personalities tended to be strong and individualistic: departmental heads such as Jim Plimsoll, Mick Shann and Arthur Tange registered a strong presence in Canberra and overseas.

Today, DFAT in Canberra and our diplomatic service abroad are a pale and attenuated shadow of what they were. The preoccupation of DFAT's rightfully wary officers is trying to keep their careers afloat in the treacherous waters of Canberra politics.

Australian foreign policy no longer has any discernible ``big ideas''. It has become almost entirely reactive: to random crises abroad and to the political judgements of the prime minister and foreign minister of the day.

Analytical and intelligence resources still exist in DFAT, but only as the inheritance of good past recruitment and training policies. But such expertise has little career value today. The core career skills now are in public service managerialism and political backup to the minister. An overtaxed DFAT executive has little energy left for assessing and representing Australia's interests in a complex world of sovereign states and powerful international organisations.

The failure lies in policy implementation. While DFAT retains capacity to analyse the significance of events abroad for Australian interests, it seems to have lost capacity or will to draw operational foreign policy conclusions, to articulate them, to convince ministers and Parliament of their soundness, and to implement them.

Such large tasks are now seen as the exclusive prerogative of an overburdened yet comfortable Foreign Minister. From senior officials in DFAT, there is now little public comment on important policy questions. Senior ambassadors have also been cut down to size: they are closely monitored and often actively discouraged from speaking publicly on their areas of responsibility.

With the growing list of policy failures, it's not surprising that, in Washington and Europe no less than in our region, there is a quiet puzzlement as to why Australian foreign policy has lost so much thrust and direction over the past three years. Among Australia's most respected media commentators, there is a similar unease. What has gone wrong?

DFA's decline began under Whitlam. He wanted a more independent foreign policy: getting Australia out of Vietnam, supporting East-West detente and strengthening the UN. When Whitlam took office, I headed an infant arms control section. We were delighted when he approved a new policy of pursuing an international ban on the use of napalm. Whitlam over-rode Defence's NATO-based objections. Australia succeeded in banning the use of napalm, as part of a review of the Geneva war conventions. Our tiny arms control section grew over subsequent years into a key division.

So Whitlam was refreshing, and he seemed good news for DFA. He signalled the need to review moribund policies after 21 years of Coalition rule. But in taking on the foreign affairs portfolio himself, appointing a non-career departmental head, Peter Wilenski, and staffing his own office with politically aligned DFA officers, Whitlam set dangerous precedents for DFA's perceived neutrality and good standing in Australia.

Fraser became prime minister in 1975. He mistrusted DFA, seeing it as having succumbed to Whitlam's personalisation of foreign policy, anti-Americanism and rejection of the idea of any continuing Soviet threat to global peace. (History largely validated Fraser's views on the Soviet Union.) Fraser wanted to restore the Cold War and a strong ANZUS alliance to centrality in Australian foreign policy. He re-invigorated ANZUS, while vigorously defending Australia against US trade protectionism.

Fraser finally laid the ghost of White Australia. He was also determined to re-invigorate the Commonwealth. He threw Australia into the effort to achieve a just Rhodesian settlement, at times irritating the more cautious British. He launched a new Commonwealth-based Asia-Pacific regionalism, which foreshadowed later Australian regional initiatives. His diplomacy located Australia powerfully within his vision of a Commonwealth multiracial association based on shared experience of the British empire. Fraser felt that, using the Commonwealth, Australia could play a particular role in the global struggle against Soviet expansionism.

Fraser was angered by DFA's resistance to his foreign policy vision. His radical solution: to run foreign policy from his own Prime Minister's Department. The International Division, previously limited to protocol-type functions, became under Allan Griffith and Roger Holdich the nerve centre of Fraser's foreign policy making. A frustrated foreign minister (Peacock) and DFA executive could get little through Cabinet without their endorsement. While Griffith and Holdich exercised their power courteously and responsibly, the experience embittered DFA. Coming after Whitlam, Fraser's prime ministership further sapped DFA's self-confidence and prestige.

Hawke who took office in 1983 wanted to give greater weight to DFA and its minister, Hayden. One day after the election, John Bowan (a foreign policy adviser to Hawke) memorably briefed PM&C International Division on the new order: unlike Fraser, Hawke would not sing revolutionary songs in Parliament House with African comrades; we could forget the Commonwealth; real power was moving back to DFA.

It did not quite turn out that way. Like Whitlam and Fraser, Hawke staffed his office with politically reliable DFA advisers. Hawke was essentially a populist domestic politician with only an emotional and unsystematic interest in foreign policy. He was sensitive to important domestic constituencies such as trade unions and human rights causes. Instinctively pro-American and pro-Israel, he had no particular Asian regional vision. Fortunately, Hayden did and he articulated it well as a strong foreign minister with a capable ex-DFA executive officer (Michael Costello). Keating and Evans inherited Hayden's intellectual legacy.

Hawke and Hayden clashed over Cambodia. Hayden wanted to end Australia's shameful support of the Khmer Rouge-dominated resistance in the long civil war (1979-91) and to work for peace. Hawke, worried about adverse US reactions, reined Hayden in.

By Hawke's time, lobby groups and the media had become active influences on foreign policy. They had learned how to bypass foreign ministers and to target prime ministers directly. A threatening reminder to all foreign service officers of their career vulnerability in the new environment was Hawke's angry reaction to the Rabuka coup in Fiji in 1987. Under pressure from trade union and human rights lobbies, Hawke criticised a hapless Australian high commissioner in Suva for not warning of the exact timing of the coup. This officer's career shortly ended. The long years of Labor rule (1983-96) were good and bad for DFA. Under foreign ministers Hayden and Evans, assisted by three impressive departmental heads, Stuart Harris (1984-88), Dick Woolcott (1988-92) and Costello (1993-96), senior officers sharpened their professional skills. Harris, an academic economist with an invigorating, Socratic style of management, challenged them to think more systematically about how to frame and balance foreign policies to maximise the national interest. Woolcott and Costello maintained this interrogative tradition, and they maintained Harris's innovative Policy Planning Branch (since abandoned).

Links with universities and think tanks in Australia and the region were consciously cultivated. Under Harris, DFA officers planned work towards an ambitious goal: a comprehensive and mutually beneficial Australian engagement with nations in the Asia-Pacific region, in economic and security terms. That plan, grounded in the Hayden-Harris years, was given full political expression under Evans and Keating, during the secretaryships of Woolcott and Costello.

A successfully met challenge was to integrate foreign affairs and trade functions into a single ministry (DFAT) in 1987. This long-overdue change was the administrative key to a single coherent foreign policy vision, after years of official energies and talents being wasted in sterile turf battles.

In 1991, Evans and Costello finally succeeded in bringing peace to Cambodia, thereby ending the 12-year Cold War-inspired tragic victimisation of this poor little country. Keating and Evans and their staffs, working with DFAT, pursued three big ideas: APEC, enmeshment with Asia and the nurturing of a special Australian relationship with Suharto's Indonesia. (I believe that history will judge Keating more favourably for these policies than the Australian public -- its perspective distorted by the experience of East Timor in 1999 -- is currently disposed to do so).

Meanwhile, almost by stealth, the new public service managerialism was sapping DFAT's institutional self-confidence. I doubt that secretaries Harris, Woolcott or Costello -- busy on big projects such as Cambodia and APEC -- appreciated the danger of this growing bureaucratic assault on DFAT's professional ethos. Or perhaps they did, but felt powerless to resist the juggernaut.

Ambassadors had by now lost most of their former prestige. With growing economy and ease of jet travel, ministers were more and more inclined to do their own "summit" diplomacy. This inevitably sapped the visibility and profile of ambassadors.

Traditional hierarchies and loyalties came under pressure. Under Labor, a culture of anti-boss industrial malcontentism was given free rein in the public service. It became virtually impossible to sack anyone: misfits were simply passed around after "counselling". The working assumption was that supervisors had erred.

More and more, ambassadors became vulnerable to a grudging and envious management culture. They had less and less real discretion as managers, but they were held more and more personally accountable for any shortcoming - policy, administrative, moral - at their posts. The old-fashioned idea - that a good ambassador, like a ship's captain, could rightly enjoy reciprocal respect and loyalty from the post team - was undermined by changing technology and workplace values. Solidarity at the post was not encouraged: staff were invited to network informally by email with contacts in Canberra on any concerns to do with the work at the post. Ambassadors had to devote more effort to monitoring internal administrative minefields that could disrupt their careers. That meant less focus on diplomacy.

Managerialism also became manifest in trendy new doctrines that divisions and embassies, as quasi-business centres, could have their outputs quantitatively measured and compared. Computerised evaluation and audit processes grew into hydra-headed monsters that could make life hell for ambassadors whose staffs were not adept in the new technology. Such gimmicks finally overstepped their credibility, but only after doing much damage to old-fashioned values of trust and cooperation. No less damaging were the relentless resources pressures "to do more with less", that forced senior officers to fight against their peers for their share of shrinking budgets and staff numbers. Solidarity broke down as desperate executives engaged in gladiatorial battles for resources.

No Australian defence force could operate properly under such erosive pressures on morale and solidarity, yet Australia's foreign service, which I believe carries equally important national interest responsibilities, was expected to do so. It is an indictment on the Labor years that highly talented and experienced senior officers in their prime such as Duncan Campbell, Rawdon Dalrymple and Garry Woodard resigned, perhaps feeling there was no future for them in the new DFAT.

So there is this paradox about the Labor years. On the one hand, the quality of DFAT policy making was tested intellectually, and I believe improved. On the other hand, DFAT's esprit de corps was broken under a series of cumulatively destructive technical and managerial changes. But the underlying systemic problem had begun as long ago as Whitlam and Fraser - a systemic devaluation of the quality of foreign service professionalism.

By the time Downer came to office in 1996, giving Costello less than 24 hours to get out of his office, DFAT's corporate morale was on the ropes already - waiting for the knockout blow.

Which came quickly. In the now standard practice, Downer and Howard first cherry-picked some of DFAT's best politically reliable officers to staff their offices. A new compliant DFAT management team, led by Phillip Flood, was installed.

Downer and Flood brought a new dimension to DFAT's decline. Downer's first career, before he went into politics, had been as a junior diplomat (1976-82). His promotion record was not rapid. He left the department at 31. Now as a young incoming Foreign Minister aged 45, Downer had power to put his personal stamp on DFAT's management style.

One can only speculate how Downer might have viewed the older generation of DFAT officers which had overseen his early work -- those now in their 50s. Certainly, his jocularly contemptuous references to those he termed "the ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary" are well known. It is fact that during Downer's first three years as minister (1996-99), Flood's executive team vigorously encouraged voluntary early redundancies of many of DFAT's older career officers. Anyone over 50 was at risk. This massive shedding of competent professionals went unreported. Those affected went quietly, anxious to salvage elsewhere what was left of their working lives. Many of them are still in their professional and intellectual prime. One wonders why they are now gardening or working in jobs such as export salesmen, archivists or archaeologists.

The effects of the new youthism are striking. Today, there is no senior officer working in DFAT's head office over 55 (and few over 50). DFAT has lost much of its former collective memory and knowledge base. Ironically, some redundant officers found tenuous work in outsourced consulting firms employed by DFAT. This practice has temporarily helped plug the worst policy making gaps. But there has been a manifest decline in collective expertise and career morale.

In the overseas service, it is a similar story. With a few distinguished exceptions, Australia now has a different kind of ambassadorial corps. The profile now is of similar age to or younger than the minister, cautious and reluctant to risk any kind of high-visibility diplomacy, and increasingly female. Even dynamic and successful high-profile diplomats - such as Chris Lamb who was so effective in helping to get our hostages out of Yugoslavia - are no longer with DFAT.

With such radical personnel change, DFAT performance has become less effective. I share a concern of Richard Butler, former Australian ambassador to the UN:

"One of the things said to me, over the last couple of years and with increasing frequency is: ‘Where has Australia gone?’ Australia used to be a significant influence around the UN, solving problems, bringing treaties to a conclusion, an honest broker, a terrifically intelligent and committed middle-sized country. But it seems to have taken itself off the field of play somewhat in recent years. What has happened?"

Downer's performance as Foreign Minister has been criticised by expert commentators such as Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan. Let's first note the plusses. He and his new secretary, Ashton Calvert, have reined in the most mindless excesses of managerialism. He seems more ready now to give loyalty to DFAT professionals whom he respects. He prides himself on his pragmatism - for example, he maintained a balanced Australian policy towards Cambodia after the so-called coup in July 1997, when politically correct lobby groups around the world were screaming for punitive sanctions. He has instituted the Foreign Affairs Council - an initiative with considerable if yet unrealised potential for broadening an informed public dialogue on Australian foreign policy.

But there are important negatives. Downer is reputedly reluctant to master complicated briefs or to encourage long-range thinking. It is disturbing how often he uses phrases such as "quite simply" or "obviously" in his articulation of foreign policy issues, when in reality Australia's foreign policy challenges are neither simple nor obvious. He is less open to real policy debate than his initiative on setting up the council would suggest. He thinks about foreign policy primarily as a domestic politician (he is not alone in this).

Downer enjoys regional crisis diplomacy, as Fiji and the Solomons showed. It gives him something to say in what is now basically a policy-free space, and it makes for good television. But it's hard to see what his travel diplomacy or "smart sanctions" achieved in advancing Australian interests in the South Pacific. Our capacity to influence outcomes in Fiji and the Solomons is manifestly much less than it was.

Australia is finally, in its recent foreign policy failures, paying the price for the progressive devaluation of foreign policy statecraft since Whitlam. A weakened and fearful department quietly treads water. These days, DFAT hardly even pays lip service to the idea of a foreign policy framework. The 1996 white paper In the National Interest, which did have some inherent value, is now little more than window dressing. Foreign policy making, when not being directed by the Prime Minister as an adjunct of domestic politics, has become reactive, short-term and ad hoc.

It’s not fair to blame Downer too much, because the primary source of Australian foreign policy failure in recent years lies with the present Prime Minister. Howard has taken foreign policy making to the logical end point towards which it was moving - as ancillary to the domestic political game.

Howard learned from the Pauline Hanson experience the domestic electoral value of a certain way of speaking about foreign policy, in order to resonate with and hopefully anchor former One Nation Party votes - which are crucial in marginal rural and urban fringe electorates. Howard seems hardly to care about the impact abroad when he talks about foreign policy in this way.

It's difficult to pin down what he says as racist or derogatory to our neighbours. He chooses words with care and is a master of ambiguity and ellipsis. But our neighbours are not stupid and they -- no less than Aboriginal Australians -- understand the coded messages he is sending to those Australian voters whose emotional empathy he seeks.

East Timor, 1999 was Howard's defining episode. In a dangerous time of flux and opportunity in Indonesia, his policy failed. For Howard, short-term domestic political temptations over-rode a responsible duty of care to the East Timorese and our long-term strategic interest with Indonesia. His policy was mostly about scoring domestic political goals: pleasing the Australian East Timor independence and human rights lobbies, and outflanking Laurie Brereton and the ALP. Howard trusted or pretended to trust B.J. Habibie's assurances, despite overwhelming intelligence that the Indonesian military would use extreme violence to sabotage a free vote. In the end, Howard and Downer's "carefully calibrated" deterrence messages were ignored by the Indonesians. We were only saved from total tragic policy failure by last-minute US pressure (which nearly was not forthcoming) on the Indonesian military. And the East Timorese people paid a terrible human price for independence.

Howard was appalled at how close Australian policy on East Timor had come to total failure. But he did not draw the correct lesson that in future he would need to make far more effort to understand Indonesia's complex political balances. Instead, he went into nationalistic assertion mode: We had been wrong to trust Indonesians. We did not need to appease them any longer. Australia would from now on stand tall in the region and defend its own values.

Howard's crude response to East Timor sent a strong message around the region of Australian alienation. Despite his assertive rhetoric, the real lesson Howard drew from his frightening East Timor experience was risk avoidance and policy retrenchment - in the UN, no less than in East Asia and the South Pacific.

Here is the answer to Butler's question. Since East Timor, Howard has steadily disengaged Australia from UN and regional diplomacy and has tried to quarantine Australia from UN human rights pressures. With Asian regionalism and UN globalism both now off Howard's map, and with no Cold War to fight, Australian foreign policy now, when not about reactive responses to crises such as Fiji, is little more than mechanical repetitions of support for global or regional trade policies.

This Government's disinclination to think rigorously about foreign policy is profoundly apparent (for example, Downer's recent thoughtless welcoming of a US proposal that we give technical support to a US national missile defence system). Without any kind of broader vision of international engagement to give credibility to its stances, Australia's influence even on vital bread-and-butter issues such as agricultural protectionism is diminishing.

In withdrawing from any serious commitment to Australian foreign policy, Howard is again tapping into the minority One Nation constituency. Anti-Indonesianism and assertive nationalism seem to play well on talkback radio. Howard seems to believe that the jingoistic assertion by ministers of truculent Australian attitudes to foreign policy and related issues has domestic electoral value as the 2001 election approaches.

In respect of Indonesia, Howard is in limbo - waiting for a Wahid initiative. Meanwhile, Indonesia's intelligentsia feel betrayed by Australia over East Timor - and worry whether powerful Australian lobbies are pursuing the political breakup of Indonesia. Since East Timor, human rights and anti-Indonesian activists have occupied the public policy space that Howard and Downer have virtually abandoned. With the Government giving no lead on reconciliation, Australia's foreign policy towards Indonesia has effectively been privatised. Indonesians fear Australia's new policy unpredictability. They worry that under pressure from interest groups, an Australian government might not support Indonesian unity in a crisis. (This is the legacy of East Timor.)

Howard, having failed to move Australian-Indonesia relations out of their post-East Timor malaise, has shifted his foreign policy focus to defence planning and the postulated "arc of instability". It suits Howard, in terms of courting floating voters, to talk up the alleged increased insecurity of our region. This myth is the modern version of reds under the bed, which served Menzies so well in the 50s.

In cynically exaggerating regional security threats, the Howard Government's defence rhetoric risks further eroding whatever is left of a sense of mutually assured security with Indonesia. Under worst-case scenarios, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In what should be a major public debate about balancing increased defence spending by a more engaged regional mutual security diplomacy, Downer and DFAT are unseen and unheard. Tragically, they have abdicated their responsibility.

What can be done? Should Australians tolerate a foreign policy-making process that has become so passive and ineffective in articulating and promoting important national interests?

Sadly, in the federal Opposition one finds comparable problems. There is a similar assertive chauvinism and resentment when regional neighbours do not play by our rules, an abiding prejudice against DFAT's alleged elitism and appeasement, and an excessive attention to vocal interest groups. Fundamentally, there is a similar reluctance to acknowledge that identifying and pursuing the national foreign policy interest requires a special kind of professional expertise. And these days, Labor is no less keen than the Coalition not to alienate former One Nation voters in marginal constituencies.

And yet I am sure that many Australian voters (on both sides) and corporations well understand that if our country is to pursue its interests in a tough political and economic world, we need a more intelligent approach to foreign policy.

Remedies will take time and major attitudinal change to achieve. Maybe the needed changes are beyond the capacity of our present political culture. DFAT bashing has become such an ingrained public habit that it would take a brave and visionary foreign minister to articulate the need to rebuild public respect for professional excellence in DFAT. And after so many DFAT heads have rolled in the past few years, one wonders how many DFAT officers would trust any proclaimed openness to professional debate and new ideas from within DFAT.

But anxious career protection by insecure bureaucrats, working under powerful and assertive ministers or prime ministers, is no basis for an effective democratic foreign policy. If the present systemic weakness continues, it will simply move the focus of foreign policy debate away from government and parliament, into less accountable arenas. Last year's street protests at the Seattle WTO meeting may be a harbinger of things to come here, if Australian governments and parties cannot do a better job of articulating and encouraging a more informed public discussion about our national foreign policy interests. That's why it is now urgent to take stock of Australia's present foreign policy institutions and attitudes.

But it is hard to see any of this happening quickly. Before the penny finally drops, Australia might have to experience more humiliating, risky and expensive foreign policy failures.