by Robert Manne
Concerning the military action in Afghanistan, Turnbull’s position is complex and ambivalent. The cause was just, but just cause is not sufficient. Before a commitment to war there must be a realistic possibility of victory. George W. Bush had forgotten “the Colin Powell doctrine. You do not get involved in these military expeditions unless you can bring overwhelming force to bear, and win”. The United States and its allies did not learn as they should have from the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. For too long after the invasion, Afghanistan was neglected due to George W. Bush’s preoccupation with finishing his father’s unfinished business in Iraq. There is now little prospect of what many in the West think of as victory. In particular, the corruption of the Karzai government inhibits the possibility of winning Afghan “hearts and minds”, the necessity of which is the key lesson, learned in the Malayan uprising, of what Turnbull describes as “Counter-Insurgency 101”. Any achievable peace in Afghanistan will be messy and unsatisfactory. It will necessarily involve compromise with elements of the Taliban. And, as Turnbull told parliament in a November 2011 speech, we owe our troops not simply “loyalty, devotion and gratitude” and “rah-rah patriotism” but also honest and intelligent analysis of how and why we got into this war and what can now realistically be achieved. Afghanistan should remind us, once again, that wars are far easier “to get into than to get out of”.
Turnbull judges the invasion of Iraq with less ambivalence and greater certainty. Though he believes that the Howard government cannot be blamed for the Anglo-American intelligence failure that justified the war – we had no assets in Iraq of our own – he does regard the invasion as a disaster. Inevitably wars are judged in large part according to their consequences. “The argument for saying it was a mistake and misconceived is a very powerful one … There are plenty of people on both sides of politics in the United States who take that view.” Turnbull’s summary goes like this. The casus belli was false. Thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives have been lost. “The Christian communities have been huge losers in Iraq.” And, as a reminder that Turnbull belongs instinctively to the realist school of international relations: “The big strategic winner has been Iran.”
Turnbull’s foreign policy realism is no more evident than in his position on the greatest development of our region and era: the rise of China. He has been thinking hard about its strategic implications for Australia. Influenced by economist Angus Maddison, he thinks the world is gradually returning to the situation that prevailed before the industrial revolution when the per capita income of China (and India) was roughly equal to the per capita incomes of the European-based agrarian societies. He is also preoccupied with the thought that we must learn from the gradual collapse of international order before the outbreak of war in August 1914 that saw the rise of a new great power, the German Empire. Turnbull has also been impressed by the ultra-realist Henry Kissinger’s recent book, On China. Believing China has no desire to impose its system of government or philosophy on the rest of the world, Turnbull contends it would be catastrophic if its rise was greeted in the way the wilder elements of the neo-conservative movement in the United States now advocate, by a policy similar to Cold War “containment”. In a speech Turnbull delivered in October 2011, he accepts Kissinger’s contrast between “missionary US exceptionalism based on ‘an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world’ with China’s disinterest in claiming its institutions are relevant outside China”. Turnbull must grasp the radical implication of this argument. It not only means that China does not pose the kind of threat the Soviet Union once did. It means that if there is now a threat to world peace it comes more from the American mindset of missionary exceptionalism than from the self-absorbed Chinese view of their own civilisation as being at the centre of the world.
Turnbull regards the debate in Australia about the rise of China as much more primitive and intolerant than the debate in the United States. “You know, the debate here seems to be for the most part, ‘Gee whiz, it’s fantastic they’re buying all our stuff.’” While, as he puts it, “all the galahs in the petshop” are talking about the rise of China, most blithely believe that China’s economic growth will make no difference to the Asia–Pacific strategic balance. Like Australian defence specialist Hugh White, Turnbull recognises this cannot be true. According to Turnbull, everyone benefited from two generations of American supremacy in the Asia–Pacific region – even, indeed especially, the Chinese. But Turnbull is emphatic: this era is now drawing to a close. “The Pax Americana has been fantastic for everybody concerned … But hello, wake up.” In general, Turnbull supports White’s idea that the best outcome for the future of the region is not at all an American withdrawal from the Asia–Pacific region but an Asian Concert of Powers, roughly similar to the situation in Europe after the Napoleonic wars. I ask him whether he agrees with White that Australian diplomacy could at least try to help Washington view the rise of China in a less alarmist way. “I think we can … Most Australian ambassadors and foreign ministers have sought to do that, on both sides.” Turnbull is not worried about the drift of US China policy should a Republican win the 2012 presidential election. He anticipates “pragmatism”. The last “ideological” Republican president was George W. Bush. “That was not regarded on either side of politics as an unqualified success.”
When Turnbull began in 2011 to speak like this about China, the Australian’s foreign editor, and Tony Abbott’s friend, Greg Sheridan, launched an extraordinary attack. “Malcolm Turnbull has delivered two important speeches on China that help explain why he was such a disastrous Liberal leader and why he should never be considered for the leadership again … The speeches are not left-wing. Rather they are devoid of political values at all.” Despite Sheridan’s venom, Turnbull does not appear greatly fazed. Sheridan is one of those who “just want to demonise China and demonise anyone who doesn’t demonise China”. Turnbull recognises the importance of pressing China on the question of Tibet, as he made a point of doing when Chinese leader Li Keqiang was in Australia. He fully accepts the importance of maintaining the dialogue on human rights with Beijing. “But I think we’ve got to recognise that we can’t run China and that the fundamental objective of our foreign policy is to advance the interests of Australia.”
For a century and a half, Turnbull continues, China has been “beaten, humiliated, raped, expropriated”. When Mao took power in 1949, he claimed: “We have now stood up.” In turn, Australia should not be afraid of standing up to China. Turnbull cites his opposition to the Chinese state’s control of Australian resources via Chinalco’s attempted takeover of Rio Tinto as a case in point. He is not only a republican. At least with regard to ownership of Australian resources by the Chinese state, as opposed to multinational companies, he is a nationalist.
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There are three interpretations of the reason Malcolm Turnbull lost the Liberal Party leadership in December 2009. One suggests that while the liberals in the party voted for him and the conservatives for Abbott, during his period as leader Turnbull appeared to be indifferent towards or even contemptuous of the group that he tells me forms the large majority of the parliamentary party – the pragmatically inclined and ideologically uncommitted. Another argues that Turnbull was deposed by the Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott group not so much because of his support for the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme but because he was the first leader in a quarter of a century who had shown disturbing signs of wishing to return the Liberal Party to true liberalism. A third interpretation suggests that the fight against any genuine action on climate change was so vital to the party’s core conservatives that they were determined Turnbull must go. There is probably some truth in all three interpretations.
Since his removal as leader, Turnbull has moved through three distinct positions on the politics but not the principle of the response to the threat of climate change. The first was outright opposition to the Coalition’s policy of “direct action”. In Fe
bruary 2010, when the Rudd government introduced its emissions trading legislation, he crossed the floor, declaring:
Having the government pay for emissions abatement, as opposed to the polluting industries themselves, is a slippery slope which can only result in higher taxes and more costly and less effective abatement of emissions. I say this as a member and former leader of a political party whose core values are a commitment to free markets and free enterprise … Schemes where bureaucrats and politicians pick technologies and winners, doling out billions of taxpayers’ dollars, neither are economically efficient nor will be environmentally effective.
The second, following his return to the shadow cabinet, was opposition by stealth and implication – by summarising the plain meaning of direct action with brutal directness and without the politician’s customary obfuscation. In May 2011, on the ABC’s Lateline, Turnbull explained the argument for Coalition policy like this:
If you believe that there is not going to be any global action and that the rest of the world will just say it’s all too hard and we’ll just let the planet get hotter and hotter, and, you know, heaven help our future generations – if you take that grim, fatalistic view of the future and you want to abandon all activity, a scheme like [direct action] is easier to stop.
Not surprisingly, this landed him in political hot water. Since that time, regarding the Opposition policy of direct action, he has more or less maintained a silence.
When I ask him whether he thinks climate change action is a moral issue, he agrees. Climate change action or inaction will determine the kind of Earth passed on to the next generation. Moreover, the countries most savagely affected by unmitigated climate change, like Tuvalu or Bangladesh, “have made the least contribution to it, and have, more often than not, the least means to deal with it”. Morality without practicality, however, will get you nowhere. I ask Turnbull if he regrets that people’s acceptance of climate science now seems to depend on whether their politics are left or right. Revealingly, he slightly misunderstands my question. “The Coalition’s official position at any rate is not to deny the climate science.”
But what about the unofficial position? Isn’t he disturbed that the ideological Right in Australia has moved towards climate change denialism, as illustrated by John Howard’s recent preface for a pamphlet published by Lord Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, the key denialist think tank in the United Kingdom? One of Turnbull’s advisers, having joined the conversation, suggests Howard was merely saying that the debate should be open. I reply that Howard has gone further in his recent autobiography. Turnbull asks: “What does Howard say?” I point out that he calls himself a climate science “agnostic”. “Well, I think an agnostic means he’s not persuaded by it.” To which I reply: “If you’re not persuaded by it, it means you don’t accept it.” Turnbull does not disagree.
The conversation moves back to the United States, where climate change denialism is a prerequisite for contenders for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. “It is astonishing,” says Turnbull.
There you are in the most scientific nation … the nation of enlightenment. And you’ve got a series of leading candidates, leading people in the Republican Party, all of whom have had to recant their past positions. Romney you know, Gingrich, all of them have had to, in order to survive in that bizarre environment, do these flip-flops. There’s been a very successful war against science.
Led by whom, I ask. “Often people with vested interests. The Koch brothers are good examples of that. There have been plenty of books written on this. There is a marked similarity between the orchestrated campaign to denigrate climate science and the campaign to denigrate the critics of the tobacco industry.”
Given what had happened in the United States, how does he remain a climate change–action optimist?
Well, I’ll tell you what my ground for optimism is. I think that there are two big players in this, that is China and the United States. The Americans are in a period of dysfunctionality on this, but it has to be said their emissions are not growing … So the big problem is China, frankly. Now the Chinese are very alert to it and are introducing an emissions trading scheme. It’s a trial and it’s got a very small price, but the Chinese do take it seriously. I think we’re more likely to see leadership out of China than America. Will the world take action? I think it will. My concern is that it will be too late to avert much of the damage. But having said that, there’s a lot we don’t know … If we’re still burning as much coal as we are today we will be leaving a very dangerous planet for our children.
Should the Liberal Party follow the Republican Party to denialism, would he, I ask finally, remain a member? Turnbull dismisses the question as “hypothetical” and the trajectory as “inconceivable”. Australian politics is “more commonsensical and more moderate” than this. No “credible leader of a major party” would be able to get away with saying that “the IPCC is rubbish, climate science is all wrong”. Climate change denialism was indeed “contrary to the views of I think just about everybody in the Coalition party room”. Our initial agreement inhibits me from mentioning it, but Turnbull knows as well as I do that the most senior member of the Coalition party room has, on at least one occasion, described as “absolute crap” the view that climate change scientists have reached a consensual position on the reality of anthropogenic global warming.
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On a recent episode of the ABC’s Q&A program, one of Turnbull’s fellow panellists criticised the group behind the anti-Kony social media campaign for pandering to the public demand for oversimplification. Turnbull smiled. That was certainly easier than trying to inject complexity into general debate, he joked. Another young man on the program suggested that Turnbull start a new party to end the disillusionment with politics his generation now felt. The audience cheered. Turnbull, as impolitic as usual, beamed.
It is not as though he hasn’t tried to lead by example. Since losing the party leadership and changing his mind about his initial impulse to quit politics, Turnbull has continued to take the opportunity to deliver a broad-ranging series of outstanding public lectures, all of which have been heavily footnoted.
According to my trope of Turnbull as the last true Deakinite Liberal, in these lectures only one great theme is conspicuously missing – social policy. Turnbull strongly supports the Productivity Commission–endorsed disability insurance scheme. Yet, perhaps because he is an economic liberal and not a social democrat, he has not put his mind to other potentially very costly but also vital extensions of the Australian welfare state: the scandalous neglect of the mentally ill and their families, for example, or the dental health of those very many Australians of limited financial means.
Two of his interventions, one outside and one inside his shadow portfolio, have public policy implications. Turnbull believes the mining boom and the favourable but almost certainly temporary terms of trade are being squandered. Until recently the notion that Australia’s per capita GDP might be 15% higher than that of the United States, as it was in 2010, would have been regarded as ridiculous. He advocates the establishment, once debt is paid off, of a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund where, perhaps, the savings are invested abroad as a counterweight to the so-called Dutch disease, the damage caused by the rise in the value of the Australian dollar to other export-exposed parts of the economy. In a recent article in the Australian Financial Review concerning Wayne Swan’s essay in the March 2012 issue of the Monthly, Turnbull argues, implicitly at least, for a new mining tax to support his sovereign wealth fund. He even criticises Swan for capitulating in 2010 to the great vested interest of the mining corporations.
Turnbull has excelled in his own portfolio, too. In August 2011, at the National Press Club, he delivered a technically complex and highly sophisticated critique of the Labor government’s plan for the nationwide delivery of fast-speed broadband, along with a practical, apparently well thought-out alternative. The second question from a journalist conce
rned some inconsequential remark made that day by Peter Reith: “Moving away from the telecommunications area for a moment …” Turnbull was reduced to sarcasm. “You will be back there in a minute, I’m sure.”
Turnbull fears Australians are losing the ability to conduct nuanced debate about serious public issues. “There would be a thousand words written about personalities and leadership in the press gallery here for every one that’s written about policy … I think I’m more optimistic about global action on climate change than I am about the standard of public debate improving.” And then quickly, “I’m only kidding.” Did he think then he might be too rational for the life of politics? “Maybe. Who knows? It’s probably a conclusion for you to make. You’ve probably got to be irrational to get into it in the first place.”
The Monthly, April 2012
MALCOLM FRASER: AN UNLIKELY RADICAL
Everyone is familiar with the political movement of youthful leftists to the right. The alternative drift – of conservatives to the left – is far less common. As I read Malcolm Fraser’s 2014 book on Australian foreign policy, Dangerous Allies, which advocates nothing less than the end of Australia’s military alliance with the United States, the career of the towering nineteenth-century British Liberal, William Gladstone, came to mind.
Gladstone began his political life arguing that the great parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 “threatened to change the form of the British government and ultimately to break up the whole frame of society”. He ended it, more than half a century later, almost tearing his party and his country apart by his determination to end the centuries-long British oppression of Ireland. Fraser’s political metamorphosis has been no less dramatic.