Extract from ABC News
National security, the Prime Minister told us this week, can have many faces.
There's the usual pouting about defence and border security, of course.
And at his first address to the National Press Club on Wednesday, Anthony Albanese argued another face was Australia's standing and influence, particularly in the Pacific.
But the pandemic gave us a whole new different sense of national vulnerability when it exposed how the erosion of our manufacturing base has left us without critical supplies. "Supply chains" were suddenly an issue of which we had all become very aware.
We now have the lowest manufacturing self-sufficiency in the OECD. We don't make stuff.
The fact that we don't make stuff — but the government wants us to — and the promise that our new AUKUS arrangements will help us make more stuff in the future were two interwoven themes of the PM's speech.
Separate from any discussion about defence manufacturing through AUKUS, the PM and his industry minister Ed Husic have linked the proposed $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund to national security.
The NRF is "about national security through economic sovereignty — our capacity to stand on our own two feet", Albanese said.
Whatever the underlying policy principles, you can see the sheer politics of this: the Coalition is opposed to the National Reconstruction Fund and it drives them mad to have the fund mentioned in the space of national security which it still regards as its own.
Opposition industry spokeswoman Sussan Ley said this week that "when they tie the AUKUS agreement to the passage of a bill in the parliament called the National Reconstruction Fund, which is about domestic manufacturing, that's not taking national security seriously".
The value of AUKUS
The NRF has tended to be mostly reported on through the prism of who in the parliament will support it. There's been talk about it being a slush fund, or not being a slush fund.
While such nation-building funds have a long history of being regarded with scepticism in Australia (often with good reason), the fact that the touted model for the fund is the Clean Energy Finance Corporation puts it in a slightly different space.
That's because the CEFC has been a great success. It's been a great success because it has been independently run as an enabler of projects, not a major investor. There might have been loans or particularly loan guarantees. But they have been only for projects assessed to be commercially viable, just struggling to get going because of a lack of links to investors.
There is still a way to go to get the National Reconstruction Fund through the parliament but the government has now set up this argument about dealing with structural weaknesses in the economy as part of the national security debate.
And in the process that discussion gets mixed up with assessments of the value of AUKUS.
In the next month we will find out what the plans are for the AUKUS national submarines. But according to the PM, AUKUS "is about much more than nuclear submarines, or even technological inter-operability".
"We recognise that pursuing and defending our sovereign interests and contributing to regional stability requires us to build our sovereign defence capability, including advanced manufacturing," he said.
"As [Defence Minister] Richard Marles has said, national security demands a whole-of-nation effort.
"It also presents a whole-of-nation opportunity: for new jobs, new industries and new expertise in science and technology and cyber.
"I'm very confident that when we announce what we have in mind, that people will see the benefit not just for defence itself, but one of the things about advanced manufacturing is that it has a spin-off."
Albanese gave the example of the car industry here:
"It was the innovation, and science, and research that had a multiplier impact and so for defence industries as well, we see that as being very much a part of the story here. Yes, it's about our sovereign capability, it's about our defence. But it is also about our industry policy, about our economy, about jobs here."
The problem for Australia
There is a slightly troubling question attached to all this, though: while there have been growing questions about operational sovereignty over our splendid (sort-of) new nuclear submarines (a sort-of "who is Sean Connery versus who is Alec Baldwin" scenario), there has to also be a question about the impact of a trilateral deal on our manufacturing capability and sovereignty. You get the sense a lot of the negotiations over this deal have actually been about.
Asked this week about the extent to which the AUKUS conversations were actually about industry policy, the PM said that was "very much the focus of all three governments and it's a focus that recognises that it's not a zero-sum game".
The problem for Australia — particularly initially — is that it looks like our first two submarines will be ones that are already built. That changes the trajectory of the sorts of industrial development and multipliers that might be involved.
And it also raises the question of how effectively we have been able to carve out a really decent bit of industry for ourselves in this three-way tussle with the UK — which has always seen AUKUS primarily as a booster for its manufacturing industry — and the US, which we have seen is subject to a certain protectionist streak over its industrial contributions.
Strategy meets military and industry
A bit of context for the way industrial and military might interact is worth reflecting upon.
The Irish author and journalist Fintan O'Toole observed in the journal Foreign Affairs this week that in the 1980s, "Margaret Thatcher smashed Britain's industrial base along with its trade unions".
"During her decade in power, manufacturing output grew by 21 per cent in France, 50 per cent in Japan, and 17 per cent in the United States," O'Toole wrote.
"In the United Kingdom, it fell by 9 per cent. This decline began a decisive collapse from which the United Kingdom's reputation as an industrial powerhouse has never recovered. Manufacturing now represents ten per cent of the country's economic output and just eight per cent of its jobs."
Breaking organised labour — from Thatcher's perspective — may have been a triumph, O'Toole notes. But it created a long term decline in industrial power, and accompanied what also proved to be ultimately a decline in military mystique.
O'Toole noted that in his official inquiry into the Iraq war, "the career civil servant John Chilcot issued a blunt assessment of British power: 'From 2006, the UK military was conducting two enduring campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. It did not have sufficient resources to do so'."
AUKUS involves getting wrapped up in the strategic world of at least one fading military power, and based on O'Toole's observations, at least one well and truly faded defence industry power.
If it is the case that what AUKUS is supposed to be offering us is not just a strategic partnership but one which can become a focus for rebuilding our economic base, we have to hope that we are getting slices of the pie that offer something substantive to the broader economy, as the PM suggests it will.
The problem is that defence has proved a budget that is beyond the scope of politicians to control, remains largely opaque to the general public, and has a spectacularly bad reputation for delivery.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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