Glenn Milne has a piece in today’s Oz making a clear and convincing argument that Labor’s strategy of focusing our defence efforts on our immediate neighborhood is right, and the government’s expeditionary force strategy is wrong. He endorses all the key arguments of opponents of the Iraq war:

• Iraq: Our involvement has compromised, not improved, Australia’s security. We have no rational exit strategy because there is no political or military solution in sight.

• WMDs: They didn’t exist, undermining the single most important rationale for going to war.

• The terrorist threat: Howard argued that our involvement in Iraq would reduce the threat to Australia. Instead Iraq has become the training ground for the next generation of terrorists, to be deployed at will. …

• And finally the AWB: Stripped of the niceties, we bombed Saddam one day and bankrolled him the next[1]

I can’t recall anything at all like this from Milne in the past (feel free to correct me), which raises the question of whether there’s some sort of hidden agenda. The obvious explanation, given that Milne is normally viewed as a spokesman for Costello, is that this is something to do with the latest leadership rumours, though it’s hard to see exactly what.

A more Machiavellian explanation occurs to me. Howard’s visit to Bush is not going to be as cosy as usual, since Bush undoubtedly wants yet more troops and we are, as Milne points out, already overcommitted. How better to stress this point to Bush than to have it being made (in effect) by Costello, in a way that suggests that Australia could be looking at pulling out of the Coalition of the Willing. On this view, the two are now working together.

Does anyone have any other ideas, or has Milne just seen the light?

Update Tim Dunlop has more

fn1. Actually, the other way around, I think. But the point is right, however hard most supporters of the war here have tried to ignore it.

The resignation of Victorian Opposition leader Robert Doyle has produced widespread suggestions that Jeff Kennett should return to politics. While Kennett could scarcely do worse than Doyle, there’s not much reason to suppose he would do a great deal better.

The core of Kennett’s political appeal in the 1990s was the claim that, thanks to Labor’s mismanagement, Victoria was in a state of crisis that could only be remedied by the radical free-market reforms he advocated. Voters bought this story in two successive elections, but had tired of it by 1999, when he was narrowly defeated. Although some claimed at the time that voters had merely intended to “send the government a message”, a string of Labor victories in by-elections suggested the opposite message – once the possibility of getting rid of Kennett became a reality, voters embraced it with enthusiasm.

Kennett’s biggest problem though, is that everything the Bracks government has done can be seen as preparation against a possible Kennett comeback. On the one hand, they’ve been obsessed with avoiding anything that would smack of fiscal irresponsibility. Official debt levels have been held down through expedients like Public-Private Partnerships (the apparent benefits are bogus, but Kennett can scarcely argue this, having been a pioneer of the PPP mania). On the other hand, they’ve restored a lot of the cuts to schools, hospitals and so on made under Kennett. As a result, Bracks can easily run a scare campaign against Kennett, but not vice versa

It’s hard to see Kennett winning in the election due in about six months, though presumably there will be some clawback from the 2002 disaster. In the longer run, anything can happen. But if he comes back, I’d say this implies a commitment to stick out a full parliamentary term as leader, and it’s not obvious that he’d be willing to do this.

As for Doyle, he will only be remembered, if at all, for his irresponsible campaigns in favour of speeding (more precisely, against any effective measures to curb speeding). His departure from politics is long overdue.

More on the souffle question from Rank and Vile

UpdateSo much for that idea

We’ve had a string of monkeys, but finally the organ grinder appears. Alexander Downer has a deplorable piece in today’s Oz, attacking John Curtin yet again. Downer quotes Wurth’s piece from last week, managing to omit Wurth’s observation that Menzies was the worst appeaser of all.

It’s pretty unedifying stuff, but if Downer wants to compare personal and historical records, it certainly won’t be to the advantage of Menzies or the Liberal Party and its predecessors.

Rather than dive into this yet, let’s look at the current debate. Downer is promoting the credentials of the Liberals as the war party, against Labor’s pacifism. Right now, we have a disastrous war in Iraq, which has immeasurably strengthened the forces of global terrorism, while dividing and weakening the democratic world, and leading to the commission of crimes including torture and murder on a large scale by those who are supposed to be defending civilised values. On the horizon, we’re promised new wars with Iran, Syria and, if you listen to the government’s most vociferous supporters, the entire Islamic world. Pacifism may not always be the answer, as John Curtin recognised, but it’s greatly preferable to the warmongers who are in charge today.

As Ros points out in a comments thread below, the starting point for Stephen Barton’s revival of the Brisbane Line appears to be the work of Dr Peter Stanley, Principal Historian, Australian War Memorial, who has denied the ‘myth’ of a Japanese invasion, and criticised Curtin’s rhetoric on the subject. He relies almost exclusively on evidence that “.. there was no invasion plan. The Japanese never planned to make Australia part of its Co-Prosperity Sphere.” His main focus is criticism of statements by the Curtin government suggesting the opposite.

There’s a crucial ambiguity here, both in Curtin’s rhetoric and in Stanley’s response. If Port Moresby had fallen, and the Australian forces in PNG been destroyed or captured (and if the Battle of the Coral Sea had gone the other way), the Japanese would surely have pushed on to occupy ports and airfields in Northern Australia to deny their use to the Allies, and, if possible, knock Australia out of the war altogether. Such a move would have strengthened their position in the Pacific, and freed forces to fight elsewhere. On the other hand, an attempt to conquer the entire country and incorporate it into the Co-Prosperity Sphere would indeed have overstretched the Japanese capacity beyond its limits.

When Curtin referred to Kokoda as saving Australia from invasion, he was certainly justified, but, in motivating the war effort, it didn’t hurt to blur the difference between a partial occupation and a total conquest. By contrast, it’s hard to see how Stanley is serving the cause of historical accuracy by failing to make this crucial distinction.

Stanley can’t be blamed for the use people like Barton are making of his work, but he can certainly be criticised for intellectual sloppiness in his analysis.

The Oz runs yet another piece of anti-Curtin revisionism, though from the line has shifted 180 degrees. Whereas Stephen Barton argues that Curtin, as PM, should have allowed the Japanese to take Port Moresby and Northern Queensland, in order to fight in Europe, Bob Wurth counts Curtin as an appeaser of Japan. His story is incoherent to put it mildly, since he quotes generic statements of desire for peace in 1939 as appeasement, while noting that by 1941 Curtin was among the leaders in warning of war.

The main focus of the story is on Curtin’s friendly relationship with the Japanese ambassador (who became a prominent pacifist after the war) and an alleged agreement over Western Australian iron ore, reported by ambassador Kawai. Wurth’s story suffers from the fact that Curtin took office a few months after Kawai reported the supposed agreement, and that no such agreement was implemented. All in all, this sounds more like Curtin manipulating Kawai in the hope of assisting the peace faction in Japan than the other way around.

One feature that seems to pop up regularly in all of this is the name of Alexander Downer, who’s cited in the Wurth piece. He’s led the attack on Curtin in the past and he seems to be linked fairly closely to Barton, who wrote a full-length piece in Online Opinion to defend him against claims of draft-dodging. Certainly, if Downer disagrees with the latest attacks, and the Barton line that an invasion of Australia is a reasonable price to pay for alliances with the great and powerful, he ought to say so now.

When I suggested yesterday that Stephen Barton had reinvented the Brisbane Line with his claim that Kokoda didn’t matter I was making the standard argumentative move of drawing a logical inference from Barton’s position which, I assumed, he would indignantly reject. Far from it! As Mark Bahnisch observes in comments, Barton explicitly endorsed the Brisbane Line strategy when he was interviewed on Lateline, saying

What I was saying was that it was an important campaign, but it wasn’t the battle that saved Australia. Australia was engaged in a world war. What that means is that events far beyond our control and far beyond our borders are ultimately going to secure our future. Now let’s take the worst-case scenario, that say they did a diversionary raid or they occupied part of Queensland. Now ultimately did that mean that Australia would lose the war? Well, once the allies won in Europe and the full might of the allies came to bear on the Japanese, ultimately the Japanese would be defeated. So it would have been a terrible situation, it would have been grim and appalling, but it ultimately would have been a temporary situation. We have to remember that this was a world war and when we talk about the battle that saved Australia, we’re sort of putting these parochial blinkers on and seeing the centre of the war’s gravity in New Guinea. We’ve got to sort of step back from that and recognise that it was a world war. (emphasis added)

Given that Barton explicitly draws parallels with the present, it’s reasonable to ask whether he thinks the same reasoning is applicable today. If strategic decisions made in Washington or London require that Australia be left open to attack or invasion, should we be comforted by the thought that “Australia’s security has traditionally been won far beyond our borders, as a member of grand alliances. ”

Barton has previously been a Liberal party staffer, and the ideas he’s presenting are consistent with (an extreme interpretation of) the government’s defence strategy of reducing emphasis on the defence of Australia in favour of a capacity to send expeditionary forces to distant conflicts. So, is anyone from the Liberal side of politics going to step forward and speak in favour of defending Australia, either in 1942 or today?

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The day before Anzac Day might not seem the best time to publish a piece claiming that the significance of the Australian victory at Kokoda was a myth propagated by the Labor party, but that’s what we got from Stephen Barton, a political scientist and former Liberal apparatchik.

The second part of the claim is both the most offensive and the most easily demolished. I got the full Kokoda legend taught to me at school in South Australia in the early 1960s, straight after saluting the flag and reciting our loyalty to the Queen at Assembly. That was about thirty years into the premiership of Sir Thomas Playford. The idea that the Labor party, or radical historians, managed to sneak the story into the school curriculum as propaganda is as unbelievable as it is offensive.

Now let’s turn to the substantive claim. I’m not an expert on military strategy, but neither is Barton, and he doesn’t cite anyone who is. He defends Churchill’s strategy of fighting Germany first and Japan second, and claims that

Japanese supply lines were overextended, their best troops were in China and their southern thrust had run out of steam

and

Had the Japanese driven south to Port Moresby it would have been a grim setback, but not a decisive blow.

This argument sounds plausible, but it would sound even more plausible if you crossed out “Port Moresby” and substituted “Townsville” or “Rockhampton”. The lines would have been extended even further then and the Japanese occupiers could have been left, as Barton suggests, to “wither on the vine” until the war was over. In effect, Barton has reinvented the Brisbane Line.*

* There’s no reason to believe the claim made by Eddie Ward that the Menzies government adopted, or even considered, a “Brisbane Line” plan. But it’s an obvious corollary of reasoning like Barton’s and there’s little doubt that such ideas were discussed.

When the Cole Commission began inquiring into AWB, past experience of the operations of this government yielded the following conclusions

* Both Downer and Howard knew that the AWB was paying kickbacks to the Iraqi regime

* This information was transmitted in a way that preserves deniability, so no conclusive proof will emerge

* No government minister will resign

* Endless hair-splitting defences of the government’s actions in this matter will emerge from those who have previously made a loud noise about Oil for Food.

With only Howard, master of the straight bat defence, still left to appear, all of these conclusions have been borne out. The offices of senior ministers were flooded with dozens cables and other communicaitons warning them of AWB activities yet, as far as the official record is concerned, no one ever looked into these any further than to ask for, and receive, a flat denial from AWB. It’s obvious that they knew enough not to ask any official questions that might produce inconvenient answers, but as predicted, no conclusive proof of this has emerged. Resignations appear to be out of the question. The theory of accountability remains in force.

With lots of legal protections for workers gone, and an openly hostile government, new strategies and organising methods are needed. Cleaners face particular difficulties working in isolated conditions and prone to all kinds of exploitation, especially as so many organisations have sacked their cleaning staff and replaced them with contractors. The Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union international campaign to improve working conditions for cleaners. You can read more about the Clean Start campaign here.

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Reader Greg Buckman has sent in his first venture into blogging, a response to Clive Hamilton’s Quarterly Essay, Whats Left: The Death of Social Democracy. Discussion welcome, with particular stress on civilised and constructive debate.
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