{"id":47495,"date":"2019-05-13T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2019-05-12T20:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=47495"},"modified":"2019-05-21T13:43:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-21T03:43:48","slug":"the-silences-of-the-australian-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-silences-of-the-australian-election\/","title":{"rendered":"The silences of the Australian election"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Election campaigns involve loud argument and quiet consensus\u2014and then there are the silences.<\/p>\n

Silences point to hard stuff just offstage: no-go, too dangerous.<\/p>\n

For political parties, breaking the silence introduces complexity that tends towards tangled nuance, toppling into dilemmas and hard choices. There be conundrums and nightmares.<\/p>\n

Risk-averse parties embrace silences, invoking on-message discipline. Don\u2019t scare or confuse voters. The corollary is that parties don\u2019t want to declare and decide.<\/p>\n

In this federal election campaign, international issues show how consensus fades quickly to silence. The biggies are the dragon conundrum, the Uncle Sam nightmare, the international unravelling, and a solo mime\u2014the government\u2019s silent scream on climate change.<\/p>\n

While much of Australia loudly argues the dragon-slayer-versus-panda-hugger puzzle, the parties tip-toe around the dragon in the room.<\/p>\n

After the fifth icy<\/a> age<\/a> with China, the Coalition and Labor don\u2019t want to slip on the ice again.<\/p>\n

Enter the ever-vivid Paul Keating, never one for silence.<\/p>\n

The former prime minister delivered a mighty swipe<\/a>, calling for dragon slayers to be banished: \u2018When the security agencies are running foreign policy, the nutters are in charge\u2019, Keating told the ABC. \u2018You\u2019d clean them out. You\u2019d clean them out.\u2019<\/p>\n

Labor disavowed<\/a> Keating, pledging no Canberra purge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The no-purge-no-nutters-here promise should mean that Labor, if victorious, won\u2019t axe Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo. The ABC\u2019s Andrew Greene makes that point in an astute piece<\/a> which had a sharp Canberra quote from a \u2018senior official\u2019 on the security threats facing a Shorten government: \u2018The three Bs are the biggest threats to Bill Shorten once he\u2019s in office; boats, bombs, and bytes.\u2019<\/p>\n

Add Beijing to that B list. The panda pressures push and pull.<\/p>\n

Neither side can play the usual reset card of \u2018new government, new day\u2019. There\u2019s no going back to the future with China, as Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong<\/a> notes: \u2018It is not simply a matter of a \u201cdiplomatic reset.\u201d Fundamentally, we are in a new phase in the relationship.\u2019<\/p>\n

Wong says the \u2018complex and consequential\u2019 panda pressures will persist and could get harder. Amen. Her answer is an uneasy balance: \u2018First, we don\u2019t pre-emptively frame China only as a threat. Second, we must be grounded in the realities.\u2019<\/p>\n

Amen, as far as it goes. You can see why the parties prefer panda silence during the campaign.<\/p>\n

On the other side of Saturday\u2019s vote, though, loud moments of truth await. Not least, as Michael Shoebridge<\/a> writes, is identifying the \u2018sophisticated state actor\u2019 that hacked into the Australian parliament\u2019s information system and the networks of the Labor, Liberal and National parties.<\/p>\n

US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, offers the mirror reverse of the dragon conundrum. Australia loves the alliance but fears Uncle Sam\u2019s economic intent.<\/p>\n

In the trade war, Australia wants Beijing to give enough for Trump to claim victory and declare peace. But Australia detests Trump\u2019s protectionist, trade-bloc vision\u2014all about America\u2019s might, not what\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

A striking silence\u2014both in policy and in politics\u2014is the collapse of any sense of principle in Australian trade policy.<\/p>\n

Once, Australia had standing as an intellectual and practical force in the World Trade Organization and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a significant player in international trade, Australia created and led the Cairns Group<\/a>. Today, the Cairns Group is limping, not loud.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s only interest in talking to Trump has been as a small target, seeking exemption from US tariffs. Australia should be mounting loud protests and principled arguments against Trump as he hacks at the WTO and the rules that have made the world better and richer.<\/p>\n

That bring us to the international unravelling. As former intelligence chief and wise owl Allan Gyngell<\/a> put it, \u2018[T]he order we have known for the past seventy years has ended. It\u2019s not being challenged. It\u2019s not changing. It\u2019s over.\u2019<\/p>\n

The \u2018unravelling\u2019 view sees the constant fretting about the \u2018rules-based order\u2019 in the 2016 defence white paper<\/a> and the 2017 foreign policy white paper<\/a> as a lament for the recently departed.<\/p>\n

The unravelling hasn\u2019t featured in the campaign or the leaders\u2019 debates. But it\u2019ll be the central motif of the incoming government briefs from the defence and foreign affairs departments. Drawing on DFAT\u2019s description of international trends in last month\u2019s\u00a0budget document<\/a>, the concerns will range from rising nationalism and geopolitical competition to anti-globalisation and protectionist sentiments, along with a shift in power in the Indo-Pacific \u2018without precedent in Australia\u2019s modern history\u2019 and wider trends such as climate change and urbanisation.<\/p>\n

Top of defence\u2019s brief will be: \u2018The\u00a0first priority<\/a>\u00a0is to manage great power competition in the Indo-Pacific.\u2019<\/p>\n

The silent scream of the campaign has been the Coalition\u2019s inability to say anything about the megatrend that\u2019s the top issue for many voters: climate change.<\/p>\n

The Coalition has been screaming at itself for so long it\u2019s lost its voice.<\/p>\n

Climate was the policy issue that twice toppled Malcolm Turnbull, once as opposition leader, then as prime minister. Labor adopted Turnbull\u2019s energy policy, so the Coalition can only argue about cost, not detail or intent or the size of the problem.<\/p>\n

The silences last till Saturday. And then …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Election campaigns involve loud argument and quiet consensus\u2014and then there are the silences. Silences point to hard stuff just offstage: no-go, too dangerous. For political parties, breaking the silence introduces complexity that tends towards tangled …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":47500,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,106,753,376],"class_list":["post-47495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia","tag-democracy","tag-election","tag-politics","dinkus-indo-pacific-election-pulse-2019"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe silences of the Australian election | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-silences-of-the-australian-election\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The silences of the Australian election | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Election campaigns involve loud argument and quiet consensus\u2014and then there are the silences. 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