Although disappointingly expressed in much defence jargon, and with some detail unclear or unexplained, Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon's announcement of the 2008 Defence white paper avoids some of the major pitfalls that so beset the development of its predecessors.
Most importantly, Fitzgibbon acknowledges that our defence capabilities are needed to defend Australia and to promote our national interests. The ill-defined and unrealistic concentration on just the former has caused numerous problems with the development and implementation of previous defence white papers.
However, the announcement was oddly short of much detail about the process to be used. It is also puzzling to see any public servant described as the principal author of a government white paper. Surely any such individual is no more or no less than the leader of a team drafting such a paper at the direction of the National Security Committee of Cabinet. The committee needs to be actively engaged in directing the paper's development, checking its analyses and examining its recommendations. It also needs to remain aware that white papers, at best, are only guidance. They should not be drafted, approved, promulgated or implemented as rigid or doctrinaire statements that brook no review in light of subsequent events.
The team assisting Defence deputy secretary Michael Pezzullo will also need to be broadly drawn from across the defence force, the Department of Defence and the whole of the Government. Not doing this significantly contributed to the intellectual incoherence of previous white papers and their inability to predict or assess many future strategic trends accurately.
Steerage of the white paper within Defence must be actively led by the minister with the full, active and continuous involvement of the Chief of the Defence Force, service chiefs and secretary. This has not occurred with previous white papers to the marked detriment of the country's long-term defence preparedness and to the range of strategic options available to various governments when eventually needed.
This has often resulted in considerable professional frustration throughout the Australian Defence Force, not least because it has meant needlessly increased operational risks to serving men and women.
Australian governments have committed the ADF to crises, ill-equipped, under-gunned, under strength or otherwise unprepared, because white paper "guidance" has been very rigidly or narrowly interpreted, or such crises were not even foreseen or acknowledged. Our defence force has consequently been too often not resourced, structured, equipped, trained or focused appropriately for the operational tasks it eventually has had to undertake at a government's direction and on the nation's behalf.
Finally, the announcement that a formal community consultation process will again be used is an encouraging sign. This type of inclusive and educative activity was one of the few enduring successes of the 2000 white paper process and well worth repeating in 2008.
The Ministerial Advisory Panel appointed, Major-General Peter Abigail (retired), Dr Mark Thomson and Dr Ross Babbage, bring widely acknowledged expertise to the task and also shared experiences of past policy development failures within Defence. The panel's make-up indicates the Government is continuing its intellectual renewal in the arena of defence policy since the election of Kevin Rudd as leader at the end of 2006. It has thankfully excluded those controversial strategic theorists who unfortunately held many Labor figures in such thrall in the 1986-2006 period even after the clearly demonstrated failures of their strategic nostrums over the past decade or so.
We cannot afford to be mugged by strategic reality ever again as Australia was during and after the 1999 East Timor crisis.
Finally, preparing the 2008 Defence white paper is only the first step of a journey well into the future and one well beyond the day-to-day perceptions or future thinking of most current politicians and virtually all electors.
In particular, it is worth noting that the 1976, 1987 and 1994 white papers were never followed by the levels of defence investment they assessed as necessary to fulfil the strategies and defence capability programs they envisaged as needed.
Indeed, the increases in defence investment of the past seven years or so have been necessary in part to cancel out the sustained under-investment over nearly three decades by both Coalition and Labor governments.
These recent increases in defence investment have also been necessary to cope with a strategic situation not envisaged, or in some cases openly rejected as likely or even possible, by flawed or rigid thinking in previous defence white papers.
There are obvious lessons here for the development and implementation of the 2008 Defence white paper.
Neil James is executive director of the Australia Defence Association.