Securing our sovereignty

To manage Australia’s medium- to long-term sovereignty, we need a national security strategy. By Senator Jim Molan.

Twin challenges

Australia faces two challenges that will demand change: Covid-19 and our deteriorating strategic environment. How we react to both could define our nation for the next few decades. Covid has created an acceptance for change almost everywhere across Australia. Similarly, the deteriorating strategic situation has been recognised and key counters have been initiated in defence, foreign interference, manufacturing and cybersecurity, to name a few. It’s generally accepted that we need to further eliminate any complacency and use the strengths of our liberal democratic system, our natural resources and the relationships we share. A better way of organising ourselves is needed to both lead change and manage these twin challenges in the medium to long term.

The greatest danger that Australia faces coming out of Covid is the belief that it would be a great achievement to just remake Australia the way it was, with its frictions, its imperfections, its complacency, its ideological divides, its archaic and wasteful structure of governments and economy, and its strategic vulnerabilities affecting our very sovereignty.

Australia has achieved great things as a liberal democracy, but for the past 75 years we’ve been rich and secure enough to hide our imperfections and inefficiencies. That era has finished. To just re-establish the nation that we were before the pandemic wouldn’t be a triumph or even an achievement. It would be a lost opportunity, a tragedy, and possibly an existential one.

Covid is a once-in-100-year tragedy, but also a once-in-100-year opportunity.

We have an obligation to turn the post-Covid period into Australia’s renaissance though vision, policies and strategies that create a self-reliant, prosperous, sovereign nation at no permanent cost to our real freedoms. Australia needs redefining, most of which will be forced on us, some of which we can choose. Embracing significant change, and how well we do, it is up to us. We just happen, at the moment, to have a government and leadership that could do it.

Governments deliver security

The days when the market provided the unprecedented prosperity Australia has enjoyed over the past 75 years, while the US guaranteed almost total security, are gone and are unlikely to return in the short to medium term. Only through using the enduring forces of the 21st century along with our natural advantages will Australia remain prosperous, liberal, democratic and securely sovereign. The government must guide that change because of the magnitude and complexity of the forces in play, but only society and industry can make it happen.

The forces that I see as creating an opportunity for change in our era are leadership, technology, social cohesion, agility, government incentives and the traditional one of national power.

Some of those are Australia’s natural advantages. If they’re allied with our geography, resources, educated population, culture and alliances, stability and governance, Australia can increase its sovereignty while maintaining the liberal values that define us. What’s needed is vision by the government, practical policies to convey that vision and comprehensive strategies to achieve them.

To just re-establish the nation that we were before the pandemic wouldn’t be a triumph or even an achievement. It would be a lost opportunity, a tragedy, and possibly an existential one.

Practicality, not ideology, is the hallmark of this government, and we’ve shown that time and again. My view is that the market has delivered extraordinary prosperity since 1945, but in the past few decades it hasn’t delivered the security that we need in these uncertain times. The Morrison government has shown itself to be a ‘doing’ government. Only ‘doing’ governments can deliver security, and security based on self-reliance is the bedrock of sovereignty.

The fundamental question is this: despite the Australian Government’s competent handling of recent crises, will the current system handle preparations for and management of a vastly more complex and lethal national security crisis that’s described in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update?

The forcing function of crisis

Covid-19 and the deteriorating security environment are two forces that won’t be denied. Covid created and illustrated national health and economic vulnerabilities, shattering some of this nation’s complacency. It has also shown that we face challenges to our sovereignty. That point has yet to be fully explored by Australian analysts. As well, the deteriorating strategic environment has been on display, and we haven’t yet seen the worst of it. This deteriorating situation could, in the extreme, threaten the very existence of our nation.

There are many examples of countries coming out of crisis much stronger than they went in. None of them was in as favourable a position as Australia is today. Examples over time have included Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the Baltic states and Israel, all of which are small to middle powers that are modern progressive nations with high levels of government intervention and prosperity; some are almost anarchically democratic.

Israel is a classic case in point and, like the Baltic states, has cultural similarities to Australia. Israel started as a unified but insecure society based on Jewish suffering and ideals, with a strong socialist bent and surrounded by hostile neighbours. Through crisis after crisis, it has used technology, leadership, social cohesion, agility, government intervention and national power to become a secure, innovative and prosperous capitalist society shaped by government intervention. It did that alongside and in parallel to market forces while maintaining its high level of democracy.

As a 21st-century nation, Israel enjoys a constant stream of visitors from other nations asking to be shown how they did it. It’s a nation with extraordinary self-reliance and confidence and a very high level of sovereignty and is dramatically increasing its level of security.

Crisis is a forcing function. Crisis offers the opportunity to change and, if you’re going to change, the change should be substantial. It doesn’t have to be revolutionary or at the expense of democracy. It may need to be implemented incrementally over time, if we have time, because it’s dependent on public acceptance. Throughout all change, the objective must be to enhance the nation’s sovereignty.

Sovereignty and freedom

What Australia must aim for is to increase our sovereignty while maintaining our core values of democracy and individual freedom in a prosperous nation. We should make strong incremental change shaped by vision, policies and strategies, towards a medium- to long-term goal of increasing sovereignty through self-reliance in all areas of the nation.

Australia has a Coalition government that isn’t ideological but extremely practical. It espouses the conservative values of Menzies and Howard, at the same time as embracing intervention by government as demanded by both Covid and the strategic environment. Being a right-of-centre conservative coalition, it may be time that the term ‘progressive’, as used by Menzies to describe the party he envisaged, be recaptured from ideologues. Conservatives understand the value of the past yet recognise the need for practical progress. Nothing could be more progressive than government vision, policies and strategies to create a truly self-reliant, prosperous and secure nation, balancing government intervention, the market and liberal democratic values in a way only a Coalition government could. Change will be forced on us. Let’s use and focus that change to create a sovereign Australia, fit for the 21st century.

‘Sovereignty’ is a term that’s used frequently by the Prime Minister and by his ministers, by academics and by commentators, and certainly by me. My definition of sovereignty is the ability of a nation to act in its own interests. In liberal democracies, sovereignty means freedom to act in the interests of both the nation and the people, as defined by our democratic processes.

Only a government can provide the vision, the policies and the strategies necessary. The vision should be related to sovereignty, the government policies should cover the entire nation, not just one part, and the strategies must lay out the objectives of each functional part of the nation without restricting ministers’ or officials’ initiative and innovation.

Being a right-of-centre conservative coalition, it may be time that the term ‘progressive’, as used by Menzies to describe the party he envisaged, be recaptured from ideologues.

How we imagine sovereignty is important. In my mind, sovereignty across the world exists along a continuum with subjugation at one end and total freedom at the other. Where Australia sits on the sovereignty spectrum can be forced on us by other nations, allies and competitors, or may be up to choices we make for ourselves.

Our freedom of action is decided in many ways. We may limit ourselves or take certain actions because our allies demand it or expect it of us. Our involvements in a series of recent conflicts are examples of this. We join formal or informal alliances because they allow us to promote our interests, such as sustaining individual freedom in a liberal democracy, overcoming a specific crisis or achieving a level of prosperity. Of course, our freedom of action is also defined by other nations, regional competitors or trading partners, especially those whose systems of government are inimical to our democratic beliefs.

One of the determinants of where we are on the continuum of sovereignty is how self-reliant we are. Self-reliance is defined as the ability to produce what we need from internal resources and not to rely on others for critical needs. Self-reliance isn’t self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is defined as being able to produce everything that you want from internal sources. The prime example that comes close to self-sufficiency is North Korea, and the regime has achieved it by impoverishing the people.

During the pandemic, we discovered the hard way that our level of self-reliance wasn’t adequate. We had to crash through to produce the personal protective equipment, medical devices and some pharmaceuticals that we’d previously assumed would always be available from overseas supply chains. That was done very well but, in the bigger scheme of things, is just one of many vulnerabilities.

We overcame those limited shortages effectively but the lesson is that, in today’s world, bad things can happen to us. The stability that’s been guaranteed by our alliance partners around the world, which has made us prosperous and perhaps given us a false sense of sovereignty, can no longer be taken for granted.

The value of a clear vision, policy and strategy

The necessary simplicity of a national vision espoused by a government as the base for its policies stands in contradistinction to the complexity of the strategy and the leadership needed to achieve that vision. The vision of a nation based on concepts of sovereignty and self-reliance is easy to say, as was the vision and policy of the most successful pre-Covid coalition policy—‘Stop the boats’. That’s the nature and the power of a vision and policy.

To write what would be the strategy to achieve the vision and policy of sovereignty would be far more complex, take far longer and involve far broader consultation than the strategy to achieve border control and to stop illegal maritime arrivals ever did. To be comprehensive, it would need to cover at least defence, the cybersphere, manufacturing, diplomacy, energy and fuels, society, finances, education, borders, intelligence, food, infrastructure and, probably the most difficult of all, government structures.

This is what other countries would call a National Security Strategy.

If in fact we have an emerging vision, actual or inferred, based on sovereignty and self-reliance in our current circumstances that addresses both Covid-19 and our strategic environment, do we have a mechanism within our current government structures to create the comprehensive strategy to achieve our vision?

We’re very successfully using the cabinet and committee system of government plus ministers and special taskforces, and of course high standards of individual leadership, to handle Covid and other challenges, such as cyber threats. The next challenge related to national security in the period after Covid is likely to involve a step-change in magnitude, and may require the type of government mechanisms that other countries have found useful.

Of the two most serious issues facing Australia, Covid is the most immediate, but managing our strategic environment is likely to be the most demanding. A vision based on sovereignty and self-reliance will address both challenges in the medium to long term. A vision may exist now, inferred or implied, and there seems to be an acceptance within society that change is necessary. Setting up the mechanism to achieve that medium- to long-term change towards self-reliance and sovereignty as we come out of Covid will be a critical step that government should consider now to shape both how we recover from the pandemic and how we face the strategic environment.

This essay was first published in ASPI’s After Covid-19 Volume 3: Voices from federal parliament.