Foreign Affairs – A Life in the Service – Philip Flood

Philip Flood AO is a former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Office of NationalAssessments and the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau. During Philip Flood’s years as a senior Australian diplomat, Australia moved closer to Asia, abolished the White Australia policy, strengthened ties with the US and made a dramatic shift from high dependence on the United Kingdom to a broader relationship with Europe. To talk of his time as a diplomat, and with the release of his memoir Dancing with Warriors, Philip Flood addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 16 November 2011. A comment on Philip Flood’s memoir, by his former colleague Richard Woolcott AC, follows this paper.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS – A LIFE IN THE SERVICE

PHILIP FLOOD

It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to talk about my book Dancing with Warriors – A Diplomatic Memoir. The Sydney Institute brings stimulus, insights and fresh ideas to a vast audience and I am delighted to pay tribute to the outstanding contribution which Anne and Gerard make to the intellectual life of Australia. I am also delighted to see here a distinguished former diplomat, Rawdon Dalrymple, and Michael Baume who became a successful diplomat after a notable career in politics and a great friend from university days with a longstanding interest in Asia, along with Dr Donald Gibson.

I am grateful for the generous comments of Dick Woolcott has sent and will respond in the course of my remarks. Except, here I’ll note that the title Dancing with Wolves was taken by a very successful film and book. I am also grateful to Nick Walker, the Director of Australian Scholarly Publishing, for his support and also my distinguished editor Dana Rowan. I owe a special debt to my wife Carole. She has shared the journey of this book.  Carole has also shared much more – the risk of being attacked in the middle of violent civil strife, threats to our lives and the drama of being personally guarded for several days by eighteen soldiers armed with Kaleshnikovs when Australian government policy was under challenge from angry Islamists. She knows how grateful I am.

Diplomats like to tell the story of the foreign minister who had too much to drink at a diplomatic reception in Lima in Peru. When music began, the foreign minister saw a beautiful woman in purple on the other side of the room. He crossed the floor and invited her to waltz. The Minister was taken aback when the personage in purple refused his invitation. He boldly asked why. He was promptly told, firstly you are drunk, secondly this is not a waltz but the Peruvian national anthem and thirdly I happen to be the Apostolic Nuncio to Peru. The story is based on fact. The Minister was Britain’s Foreign Secretary George Brown. A broader point of the story is that ministers have choices.

When I joined the foreign service, Australia’s foreign policy was dominated by our relations with Britain and with the United States. Our links with Asia were broad but essentially modest. Women were second class citizens, indigenous Australians were treated as social outcasts, religious divisions permeated social life and the White Australia policy held sway.

Now half a century later many of the restrictions and divisions in our society have been vigorously addressed. Ancient barriers to women’s careers have been dismantled more quickly here than in most other societies; there is an emerging respect for indigenous culture; religious tolerance has become a valued ideal; the White Australia Policy has been abandoned; our economy has been opened to globalisation and immigration has transformed and enriched our way of life. Over this same period our foreign and trade policy has come of age. For some time we have been a player in our own right.

After he came here in 1836, Charles Darwin wrote that Australia “doubtless some day will reign a great princess in the south” but he felt that Australia was, for the moment, “too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect”. We may not yet be the great princess in the south, but international respect for the quality of Australia’s achievements, including our role in international affairs, has unquestionably increased. From the mid twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, Australia’s stature in the world has been enhanced both by our successful management of our economy and by the quality of our defence, foreign and trade policies. Australia is regarded as a more significant and more substantial country than it was 60 years ago.

Over this time, I have been fortunate to work for nine prime ministers and closely with five of them – Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard, and of course with many foreign and trade ministers.

The conclusion of my book is that our leaders – the warriors of government – have done well in advancing Australia’s security, in building stronger and more diverse relations with the rest of the world and in creating the envious situation, or if you wish the relatively envious situation, Australia enjoys today.

Our political leaders have done particularly well in building substantial government to government and commercial relations with the major countries of Asia – with China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and, to a lesser extent India.

Today, we benefit from an extraordinary relationship with China. It seems hard to remember that, until 1972, our formal position was that China did not exist or, more strictly, that Taiwan was the government of all China. All prime ministers from Whitlam to Howard and since have been focused on China. China is our biggest trading partner taking a quarter of all exports. Australian governments have had to take the lead since, in China, the Chinese government makes the running in every core activity. Howard gave special attention to expanding the trade and investment relationship with China and took a significantly different policy to the United States.

Howard emphatically concluded Australia could both develop a substantial economic relationship with China without diverting in any way from our strong alliance relationship with the US. Indeed he strengthened the alliance.

But it was Whitlam who started the process of change. As a relatively young officer in 1973 I was asked to join the party of the first Australian Prime Minister to visit China. As was his custom Whitlam took with him to China a very large official party. I was the junior in a strong team. We knew the Prime Minister would be welcomed warmly but no one was prepared for the breathtaking reception at Beijing Airport. More than ten thousand brightly dressed schoolchildren waved coloured flags and ribbons and chanted a welcome as the large party emerged from the plane. Thousands of people, smiling and waving, lined the streets as we drove into Beijing. The Chinese leadership wanted to make a spectacular gesture of approval to mark the first official visit to China by an Australian head of government.

The carnival atmosphere was grandly celebratory, but totally unreal. At the time, China was still substantially closed, with the Cultural Revolution still running its course. The Chinese economy was in a total mess and Mao’s Great Leap Forward had fallen flat on its face. Yet here was an ailing communist state pulling out all stops for the leader of what it surely knew was a broadly conservative capitalist country.

My role was very modest – helping negotiate wheat and sugar deals and helping Dick Woolcott negotiate the press communiqué.

Every member of the party met the remarkably clever Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, the man who when asked what he thought of the French revolution replied that it was still too early to tell. Whitlam insisted on meeting the frail Chairman Mao Zedong on his own. His foreign affairs advisers – Dick Woolcott and I – were excluded from this meeting.

After the meeting, we asked the Prime Minister how he found Chairman Mao. “Comrades,” Whitlam remarked, “I asked Mao what would have happened if, instead of President Kennedy, President Khrushchev had been assassinated.” Whitlam said that Chairman Mao replied: “Prime Minister, one thing is certain, Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs Khrushchev!” Dick very quickly said, “You made that up Prime Minister.” It was sometime before Whitlam admitted that he had. Mao was senile and barely coherent.

Leaving aside his sense of humour, Whitlam’s visit was most valuable in restoring balance to our foreign policy. The visit put a ceremonial seal at the end of the previous fiction whereby the government in Taipei was regarded as the government of all of China. Whitlam did not know this but the United States moved at around the same time to recognise Communist China. For Australia it was the beginning of a remarkable change.

Japan is another instance where our political leaders have been ahead of public opinion. A very important development, before I came to government, was the bilateral trade agreement forged by John McEwen. When he was Prime Minister Howard surprised many Australians when he said, I believe correctly, that Japan is Australia’s closest friend in Asia. Japan is the Asian country most likely to support Australian political and strategic initiatives.

I was fortunate to work closely with Gareth Evans in changing Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. His work was carried on by Alexander Downer. Their work enjoyed the strong backing of Hawke, Keating and Howard.

Dick Woolcott and I agree on most aspects of Australian policy towards Indonesia. We welcome the much closer links Australia enjoys today. But we don’t agree on the issue of Prime Minister Howard’s handling of East Timor in 1998 and 1999. In my view, Howard deserves high credit for his handling of this matter. He seized an opportunity which led to the people of the province being able to decide their own future. After the departure of Soeharto as President in 1998 his successor Habibie was more open to ideas about East Timor. Howard wrote to Habibie on 19 December 1998 encouraging Indonesia to think about an act of self-determination for East Timor at some future time.

Howard has been criticised, wrongly in my view, because Habibie went far beyond Howard’s proposal and decided to have a referendum nearly immediately. The referendum, organised by the UN, was held on 30 August 1999. Indonesia’s preferred outcome was rejected by 78.5 per cent of the vote. Disappointed with the outcome, Indonesia’s military behaved as vengeful spoilers and proceeded to trash the capital Dili. The referendum led on to independence for the new nation of Timor Leste. At the time our role generated criticism of Australia amongst nationalist elements in Indonesia. The great progress in relations initiated by Evans was temporarily arrested but this was quickly redressed.

A conspicuous area of bipartisan cooperation has been the strengthening of relations with the United States. Another has been the development of Australia’s aid agency. We are a wealthy country and both sides of politics have supported the development of a fine organisation AusAID.

Another issue is our relationship with Britain. I was part of Australia’s negotiating team when Britain was seeking to join the EEC. It took quite a while for Australian leaders to realise that Britain was not going to protect Australia’s interests, indeed that Britain’s interests were very different from ours and that we had to fight hard on our own. Leaders like Doug Anthony realized we had to develop new markets elsewhere to replace what we were losing because of rampant protectionism in Europe. Britain joining the EU/EEC did us a favour. It accentuated a focus on Asia, obliged us to look more closely at markets in the Middle East and Latin America and encouraged us to think more broadly about Europe.

In my opinion, the most significant Australian foreign ministers in the past 60 years have been Percy Spender and Gareth Evans. Spender’s achievements on Australia’s behalf in negotiating the ANZUS treaty and in inaugurating the Colombo Plan of assistance to Asian and Pacific countries were outstanding. Evans’ achievement in transforming Australia’s hitherto fragile relationship with our largest neighbour Indonesia was of the highest order. Keating, Howard, Downer, Rudd and Gillard subsequently made important contributions but it was Evans who added the substance and ballast that made later achievements possible. For his substantial and innovative work in bringing peace to Cambodia, Evans was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The story of our foreign and trade policy is not all positive. Australia’s success in building political and commercial links with Asia has not been matched by a commensurate success in building up a generation of Asia-literate Australians, comfortable with the languages and cultures of our region. At our universities, enrolments in Asian languages are very low – in Indonesian and Japanese they have been declining – and those studying mandarin are mainly students of Chinese origin and many of them are Cantonese speaking Chinese seeking to learn mandarin.

In the 1960s, 40 per cent of high school students studied a second language for matriculation. Today the number is 12 per cent and declining. Australia’s first Prime Minister Edmund Barton carried on a conversation with the Pope in Latin. For 100 years, until Rudd, no Australian prime minister, no foreign minister, no trade or defence minister was able to converse officially in a foreign language. What a contrast with Indonesia where the street sweeper in Jakarta speaks two languages – betawi and bahasa Indonesia; the elite in Indonesia happily speak three or four languages.

Australia’s expenditure on two-way cultural exchanges with Asia is derisory and a national embarrassment. Understanding Asian cultures and values is crucial if we are to engage successfully in the region in the long term. And, surprisingly, two former diplomats – Downer and Rudd – allowed the resources of the foreign service to be run down.

Poor leadership on Asian languages and culture are some of the greatest failures of our political leaders over the past two decades.

There have been other failures. We have accepted 700,000 refugees over the past 70 years – over 10,000 a year – and the overwhelming majority have become good citizens. But now both sides of politics have lost a sense of perspective – the numbers of refugees fleeing to Europe are in the hundreds of thousands while the United States has over 12 million illegal migrants. The tawdry national debate now going on about refugees diminishes us as a nation. Even worse, some among us are becoming fearful. A confident society is imperilled by fear. Fear will erode the confidence we must have to prosper and play our part in the community of nations.

My generation of diplomats believed, and still believes, that a larger population is in Australia’s interests. But support for this is waning. We risk letting the failures of state governments on infrastructure and on water define and limit our national ambitions. We risk losing the notion of the future as a positive place to be.

In the book, I have not given comprehensive attention to the war in Iraq because this conflict arose after I had left the service. I became involved in the issue of intelligence about the war when I was asked by government to conduct a review of Australia’s intelligence agencies. I mention it here because it is an issue on which Dick Woolcott and I disagree.

My inquiry concluded there was an intelligence failure, indeed we shared in the allied intelligence failure on the key question of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Both sides of Australian politics accepted my conclusions and recommendations. There has been much revisionist writing to the effect that allied leaders lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

This is not correct. Prior to military action against Iraq, in March 2003, the coalition and all major governments, including those of France, Germany, China, Japan and Russia, believed that Saddam had WMD; the only government in the world that claimed Iraq was not working on, and did not have, biological and chemical weapons was the Government of Saddam Hussein. The fact that Saddam chose to resist inspections to the bitter end suggested strongly, though in the event wrongly, that he had WMD to protect and perhaps that he hoped to avoid defeat by using them.

Many people choose to ignore other factors relevant to the Iraq conflict – these were Saddam’s egregious breaches of UN Security Council resolutions, his history of use of WMD, the brutal nature of his regime and his support for terrorism all of which combined to form a potent threat to the international community. I supported, and still support, the decision to invade Iraq but subsequent events were not well handled. The most glaring weakness by the United States was the failure to prepare adequately for the aftermath of the war and, ignoring the lessons of the Vietnam war, America had desultory cultural knowledge of Iraq. But, even now, 70 per cent of Iraqis feel it was worth getting rid of Saddam; his rule had benefited mainly the 20 per cent who were Sunnis at the expense of the Shias and the Kurds. It may be twenty years before we know the full outcome of the Iraq war.

Of course, the world is a scary place – a global economic crisis, poor economic and financial management in many places, an insane regime in North Korea, foolish pretensions in Iran, fragile governance in Pakistan, deep-seated tensions in the Middle East, an unresolved crisis in Palestine, deluded Islamist terrorists, insufficient controls on nuclear weapons, infectious diseases that can be transmitted with terrifying swiftness because of the speed and frequency of modern travel, and much else – and it is easy to be pessimistic.

My book argues there are good reasons for Australians to be optimistic about our future:

• We have embraced the benefits of globalisation and we are well linked to the fastest-growing countries in Asia. We are the only Western country positioned so geographically close to Asia.
• Our federal political and legal institutions are impressively strong, and our economic and financial institutions have proved to be more robust than those of larger competitors.
• We are well placed, in terms of economic resources, to tackle the social problems that our community faces.

I am not starry-eyed and have no illusions. Many of you will have seen the current production of Julius Caesar by the Bell Shakespeare company at the Opera House. The ambition of Caesar, the weakness of Brutus and the duplicity and treachery of Cassius were well on display. Very little has changed.

We see daily in our politics ruthlessness, intrigue, incompetence, flattery and self-delusion. We should never be surprised that the great vital forces of the human soul – love, self-sacrifice, heroism and artistic creativity – are more in evidence in the community and in our own families than in the national parliament.

Nevertheless our political leaders are very important. For they have the greatest influence in changing society. And whatever you think of our politicians, nationally we are not governed by corrupt elites seeking personal wealth. The high standards of legality, transparency and accountability enforced at the federal level are a redoubtable bulwark against financial misdemeanour on the part of elected federal politicians. Much more importantly, Australia’s constitution, the High Court, a professional civil service, a robust media and regular elections, though not a guarantee, make it hard to sustain poor policies, or, at least, hard to sustain poor policies for very long. Even during a global financial crisis we have good reason to be optimistic.

RICHARD WOOLCOTT COMMENTS ON DANCING WITH WARRIORS – A DIPLOMATIC MEMOIR

I am very sorry that I am in Canberra this evening and unable to participate in what I believe will be an interesting event and discussion, to which I have been looking forward.

In the first notice the Institute sent out, Philip’s book was described as “Dancing with Wolves” instead of “Dancing with Warriors”.  If my memory serves me correctly this was the title of a Kevin Costner film.  I am reminded of that confronting New Zealand film “Once were Warriors”.

Some of our political leaders who fight political battles for good causes can be described as warriors, but others whose policies lead to deaths and widespread suffering might in fact be better described as wolves. Some other political figures remind me less of warriors or wolves and more of the nervous and self protecting knight Rodney in the often amusing Wizard of Id comic strip.

Sadly, I think the culture of conformity which I believe has grown up in the public service and the first decade of this century, during which the number of conviction politicians declined under the growing influence of polls, focus groups and a response to popularism. The purpose of good government should be much more than acting to stay in office.

Philip and I have both had the privilege of serving as Secretaries of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at very active and demanding but different periods.  I occupied the position from 1988 to 1992.  Philip became Secretary in March 1996, four years after I had retired. My time as Secretary was served under the Hawke – and briefly the Keating – Government.  Except for a few days with Bill Hayden, Gareth Evans was Foreign Minister throughout my time.  Conversely, Philip was Secretary under the Howard Government with Alexander Downer as his Foreign Minister for all of his secretaryship.

We were both, therefore, involved in major historic events and I am sorry we are not able to discuss them with the audience tonight. Philip was posted in two Asian countries, the United States, three countries in Europe and the UK (despite the fact that as he describes in the book he had confessed to Howard he was a Republican!)  Conversely I served in four South East Asian posts, the United Nations for six years, two African countries and in one European country twice (if you count the former Soviet Union as Europe). The major post in which we both shared service was in Indonesia – one of Australia’s four most important bi-lateral posts – some 15 years apart.  We both faced considerable difficulties.

I was in Jakarta when the five journalists working for Australian media were killed Balibo in October 1975 and when Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1975.  Philip was in Jakarta when the Santa Cruz massacre occurred in November 1991 (I was with Foreign Minister Gareth Evans in Seoul at the 3^rd APEC Ministerial Meeting.)  Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas was their too and it was Gareth and I who, having received the first news reports about Santa Cruz, informed Ali about it. Philip was Secretary during the military intervention in East Timor.

Philip was also in Jakarta for Prime Minister Keating’s visit to Indonesia in April 1992.  What, perhaps, he may not have known was that I had briefed Keating that Indonesia should be one of the first countries he should visit as PM. Keating had wanted me to accompany him on his visit but I said this would cause difficulties as I had only recently retired and we had a competent Ambassador in Jakarta.

Although I had retired, I was asked by both Howard and Foreign Minister Downer to carry out Special Envoy missions in March/April 1996. Philip was Secretary at this time. The then Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr Mahathir had announced that he was visiting New Zealand.  Australia was not included. I was asked by Howard to visit Kuala Lumpur and see if Mahathir could be persuaded to include Australia now there was a new Government. This was done. Alexander Downer also asked me to visit Jakarta and urge President Suharto to receive him when he visited Jakarta in order to pave the way for an early visit by Howard. (Downer was concerned because our relations with Indonesia had drifted somewhat and Suharto had declined to receive Gareth Evans on his last visit, as Philip describes in his book). This was also arranged.

I was also appointed to the Advisory Council which produced the first White Paper on foreign and trade policy and which Philip describes (pages 255-259).  Despite these events I fell out with both Howard and Downer when after much thought I opposed publicly our involvement in the destructive and in my view unnecessary war against Iraq before the conflict in Afghanistan had been properly resolved. This is of course one issue on which Philip and I would disagree.

There are others.  or example we have some different views on the lead up to the intervention in East Timor, which I have set out in my 2003 book The Hot Seat;  Reflections on Diplomacy from Stalin’s Death to the Bali Bombings.

I also have a problem with Philip’s endorsement of the Howard doctrine that Australia does not have to choose between its history and its geography. At best this is questionable. Our history is a past reality some aspects of which are inspirational. Others are reprehensible. Our history also leads a number in the community psychologically to hanker after a bygone past. Our geography is in fact a geopolitical reality and this is where our future lies.  I had hoped to discuss this important issue tonight.

I could go on but it would not be appropriate to do so. To conclude, Philip’s book, published by Australian Scholarly Publications, is indeed a detailed, well researched and important contribution to what will be an ongoing debate about our foreign policy in the 1990s and in the first few years of this century, especially the Howard years as a background to the great changes in the Asia Pacific region and global power balances which we will face as this decade unfolds.  I really regret that I am not able to be with you tonight.