Strategic timescales differed, the senior political adviser remarked. On matters such as Afghanistan, the perspective and strategy of those working in the aid area was over a 10-year timescale. Defence, by contrast, was operating on a six-month timescale, not coincidentally the same as a tour of operation. The Foreign Affairs people, on the other hand, worked on what felt like a one-week timescale.
Having different timescales for each agency was not a problem of itself, but all of the agencies badly needed to have a conversation together about what was going to happen over the next couple of years, he said.
The adviser was a Briton, not an Australian, and he was discussing grand strategy, particularly on national security on the other side of the globe, but the feeling that he was describing matters here was very strong. It was not merely because of our similar (and similarly unavailing) interests in Afghanistan, and some similar suffocating relationships with the United States, or a common general worry that the strategy of our political leaders is of very short timescale and is careless of our long-term interests. It was also perhaps a reflection of the fact that one of those on whom the enquiry was most leaning for wise counsel was Professor Richard Mulgan of the ANU, a political scientist well versed in our problems as well.
One difference was that the Brits are talking about it, and at a political level. And not in the manner of a white paper seeking to conceal all differences of view, or to smother everything in vague and meaningless phrases of a sort difficult to contradict. Two decades ago, Australia compared favourably to Britain for openness of political discussion; these days we are, thanks to tight political management, light years behind, to our great detriment. This was a parliamentary inquiry – a frank and somewhat brutal one, if, as usual in Britain but not Australia, not one which divided members on party lines.
One can go overboard about insisting on the need for long-term thinking, grand strategy, and ‘‘vision’’. Events have a way of bumping into all of them, sometimes, for example, with a global financial crisis that has now had most of the world (including Britain) in a depression which has lasted longer than the Great Depression in a way that has seriously compressed economic capacity to follow long-term dreams. A good many politicians and administrators are, in any event, hard-pressed managing from day to day, and would only be distracted from doing that properly if they were forced to wonder how or why they were doing it, or whether, say, 20 years from now, anyone would be bothering. There are, moreover, any number of people who insist medium and long-term issues such as climate change, the rise of China, or the ageing of the population override stands over our geography, our permanent interests and our selfish hopes for ourselves.
Every generation tends to be hard on its own politicians, and to think them grubby, self-obsessed and too political to be capable of being seen as working for the long-term public good. In this sense, a good deal of the current pessimism about our leaders – on both sides of the fence – needs a discount. But even when that is taken into account, some have a particularly nagging fear that the meanness, pettiness, intensity and lack of meaning of present political warfare stamps our modern political generation as Lilliputians at a time when there was never so strong a demand for calmness and clear thinking.
In much the same way that one can never learn English grammar so well as by studying another language, preferably a dead one such as classical Latin, there is much to think about, in terms of Australia, from some British navel-gazing.
Britain’s House of Commons select committee on public administration has ‘‘little confidence that government policies are informed by a clear, coherent strategic approach, itself informed by a coherent assessment of the public’s aspirations and their perception of the national interest,’’ the committee unanimously said.
‘‘The cabinet and its subcommittee are made accountable for decisions, but there remains a critical unfulfilled role at the centre of government in coordinating and reconciling priorities, to ensure that long-term and short-term goals are coherent across departments. Policy decisions are made for short-term reasons, little reflecting the longer term interests of the nation.’’
This had, it said, led to mistakes which are becoming evident in such areas as defence planning and defence acquisition policies, energy policy, policy on climate change, economic policy, and policy and planning on child poverty.
It used Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of where ‘‘our lack of consistent strategy goes a long way towards explaining why the conflicts have not gone well for the UK.’’ (Perhaps this shows we are not so similar, given that our politicians have never admitted that our adventures in the same places had been other than enormous successes, at least for us.)
In an earlier inquiry, the committee had asked : who does Britain’s national strategy?
‘‘The answer we received was ‘no-one’. We concluded that ‘as things stand, there is little idea of what the UK’s national interest is, and therefore what our strategic purpose should be.’’’
The Cameron government had responded with some hostility to this remark, and ended up drafting a set of six strategic aims, which, it said, defined the national interest. The problem was that each was a motherhood statement, as appropriate for Papua New Guinea or Australia as for Britain, and virtually incapable of informing or determining a hard choice, or conflict of priorities. These were: