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Subject:
Big guns come under fire
Volkodav
4/5/2009 7:07:00 AM
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Patrick Walters, National security editor | April 04, 2009
Article from: The Australian
JUST weeks before he is due to deliver the Rudd Government's landmark defence blueprint for the next generation, Joel Fitzgibbon finds himself fighting for his political life. The bizarre allegation that the Defence Signals Directorate may have spied on its own minister and the revelations about his friendship with Chinese-Australian businesswoman Helen Liu have damaged Fitzgibbon and highlighted a deeper systemic crisis within Australia's defence administration.
When defence chiefs first heard the news from press reports nine days ago they were doubly shocked and amazed. Shocked that DSD could be accused of what would amount to a criminal offence and stunned that the Defence Minister had declined to tell them about the story about to be unleashed in Fairfax newspapers.
Whatever the doubts about the veracity of the initial story, it generated an immediate political effect. Fitzgibbon was forced to admit he had failed to declare two paid trips to China as a guest of Liu's.
But more than a week after the Fairfax press ran the story we are yet to see any hard evidence that suggests the Defence Department deliberately conducted a secret investigation into Fitzgibbon amid concerns about his ties with Liu.
The assertion that a DSD officer accessed Fitzgibbon's office computer systems and found Liu's banking details has been firmly rebutted by the Defence Department.
Defence so far has turned up nothing to substantiate the claims concerning DSD or that departmental officers had raised concerns about Fitzgibbon's China connections.
Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Ian Carnell is undertaking a forensic search into DSD's information technology networks that could take several months. Carnell's probe will try to ascertain whether anyone in DSD may have breached carefully prescribed guidelines on domestic interception of electronic communications.
Embattled Defence Department chief Nick Warner's carefully drafted statement issued a week ago bears careful scrutiny.
"Neither the Defence Signals Directorate nor any other part of Defence has had any access, authorised or unauthorised, to personal information within the Minister's office, including telephone contact numbers," Warner added carefully, noting that these were preliminary findings and Defence would continue to investigate the matter in co-operation with Carnell.
ASIO, unusually, also went to the trouble of publicly declaring they had no security interest in Liu.
If there is a genuine defence provenance to the claims published in the Fairfax press it would not have been orchestrated within DSD. It is more likely to reside with an individual in either the department's defence security or intelligence realm who felt his concerns about Fitzgibbon's ties with Liu were not being taken seriously by his superiors.
A tale that apparently began with an anonymous letter sent to The Age has produced a further serious erosion of trust between Fitzgibbon and his department, particularly at the top level.
Fitzgibbon knows he was guilty of poor judgment in not declaring the two China trips. The wisdom of subletting accommodation from the Liu family in Canberra, given his sensitive ministerial responsibilities, also should have generated further reflection.
Kevin Rudd has made it clear than any further transgressions of the kind Fitzgibbon reported last week will end his tenure as Defence Minister. With the Prime Minister thinking about a ministerial reshuffle later this year, Fitzgibbon's performance over the coming weeks will be crucial for his immediate political trajectory.
Like all of his recent predecessors who have held the defence portfolio, Fitzgibbon has struggled to exert his authority over that huge, lumbering beast and its $22 billion annual budget. Relations between Fitzgibbon and his top departmental advisers were never smooth from the start. Mutual suspicion early on has gradually evolved into a mutual lack of confidence. "It's sour but the work continues," observed one senior official earlier this week. On Fitzgibbon's part there is a palpable sense that at times he has been badly let down by his department and given misleading advice, contributing further to a steady erosion of confidence.
Early on Fitzgibbon's party political instincts came to the fore in the handling of sensitive procurement issues alarming his bureaucratic advisers. In the view of his critics he pushed too hard in wanting Defence to seriously consider the F-22 fighter, never a serious option, embarrassing the Pentagon in the process.
Fitzgibbon's own steep learning curve in the portfolio has been hampered by a parliamentary office short of experienced advisers with a deep knowledge of the defence business. He lost his first chief of staff, Daniel Cotterill, after just nine months in the job.
More importantly he recently lost Greg Combet, the highly regarded parliamentary secretary for defence procurement, who had been instrumental in resolving some fundamental procurement issues with Defence including the future of the Defence Materiel Organisation. Inexplicably, Combet's job assisting Fitzgibbon has not been filled.
In recent months Fitzgibbon has championed the need for wholesale reform of Defence's antiquated administrative and IT processes as well as defence procurement. A year ago he announced Defence would find $10 billion worth of savings over the next decade; in the upcoming white paper there is reportedly a net savings target of $15 billion - an enormous challenge for Defence.
Fitzgibbon is proud of saying that he is driving the biggest reform project in Defence "in the history of our federation". It isn't. But there is still a glaring absence of transparency and detail in outlining where and how the billions of promised savings will be realised.
The acid test for Fitzgibbon remains the new defence policy white paper commissioned more than a year ago. It was originally due to be published in December before the deadline slipped to March. It is now expected late this month but the budget crisis could still delay its publication until midyear.
Fitzgibbon needs to deliver a strategically sound and politically credible document underpinned by a robust budget. But already the Government's pledge to increase defence spending by 3 per cent annually in real terms is under dire threat from Treasury and Finance which want to strip billions out of defence during the next four years.
Sources familiar with the white paper's present draft say that after 14 months of effort it still needs further refinement before it sees the light of day. But a bigger problem for Fitzgibbon is getting the Prime Minister to endorse it. Rudd's hectic travel schedule has caused a huge bank-up of submissions to cabinet's national security committee, including the white paper.
The history of the past decade suggests there is some kind of fundamental flaw in the relationship between the Defence Department and defence minister.
In that time there have been six ministers, all of whom have struggled to establish the essential trust needed for an effective working partnership with Russell Hill, the Defence HQ in Canberra . You have to go back to Robert Ray, who spent six years in the job from 1990 to 1996, to find a defence minister who had a fundamentally sound relationship with his military and civilian advisers.
During the past 10 years there have also been five Defence Department secretaries, two of whom have been sacked by their ministers, and a third now with badly strained relations with his political boss.
The churn in defence ministers contrasts dramatically with ministerial longevity in foreign affairs, where there have been only four holders of the post in 26 years.
One former Defence Department boss says a big problem now with minister-departmental relations is governments now want to know everything. "It's the chronic problem of a very big and slow-moving organisation in a political world where ministers run on a 24-hour cycle," he says.
The sheer volume of business now transacted between the department and the minister has contributed to bureaucratic tensions. Fitzgibbon's office receives 5000 formal Defence Department submissions, a far cry from an annual average of 1000 two decades ago.
Rudd curiously observed last week that there were "always tensions or there have been for quite some time" between defence ministers and the Defence Department. "There's nothing particularly unusual about that," the Prime Minister noted.
But former senior defence department official, Hugh White, says it's up to the government to fix problems with Defence rather than blaming it for continuing glitches.
"The performance of the defence organisation is the responsibility of the government of the day," observes White, who is an Australian National University professor and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute. "What have they done in 15 months? The answer is nothing. If they believe this organisation is dysfunctional it is their responsibility to fix it. By criticising Defence they are condemning their own administration."
White argues there are very deep questions about the capacity of the defence organisation to deliver the kind of military capabilities Australia needs, pointing to a long list of procurement debacles.
In the end, whatever the level of bureaucratic resistance and inertia to reform, the buck stops with the minister for defence. "Any deficiencies in the performance of the defence organisation is ultimately a deficiency in the performance of the minister," White adds. "There's been a very significant failure in leadership and management of the organisation for a long time."
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