{"id":61467,"date":"2020-12-21T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2020-12-20T19:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=61467"},"modified":"2020-12-20T20:20:40","modified_gmt":"2020-12-20T09:20:40","slug":"fifty-years-of-foreign-affairs-the-scrooge-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/fifty-years-of-foreign-affairs-the-scrooge-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty years of Foreign Affairs: the scrooge effect"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Australia heads towards a dismal achievement: halving what it spends on diplomacy in only three decades.<\/p>\n

The Joe Biden rule<\/a> (\u2018Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value\u2019) says Australia has consistently undervalued diplomacy.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the halving calculation from Tania Miletic and John Langmore<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Australian diplomacy has had a low priority throughout the last quarter century. The proportion of total Commonwealth expenditure allocated to diplomacy fell from 0.38 percent in 1995\u201396 to 0.22 percent in 2018\u201319, a decline of 42 percent. The budget announced on 6 October 2020 included forward estimates for diplomacy which will reduce their share of Commonwealth outlays even further to 0.18 percent in 2023\u201324. This means that by 2023\u201324, Australian outlays on diplomacy will have been cut by 53 percent during the previous 28 years.<\/p>\n

Halving the proportion of spending on diplomacy at a time of rising tension is shockingly irresponsible and ensures Australia\u2019s diplomatic service is so inadequately funded and staffed that it cannot be fully effective.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u2018scrooge-like\u2019<\/a> approach to diplomacy hurts our national interests, as Ben Oquist notes. Yet Canberra has been doing the scrooge for so long, he writes, revamping \u2018Australia\u2019s diplomatic architecture will require more than money; a shift in the cultural and political status we accord diplomacy is needed too\u2019.<\/p>\n

The scrooge effect describes significant structural forces acting on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. In engineering, structural forces cause compression, tension, shear, bending and torsion; DFAT knows most of those.<\/p>\n

The previous column described six forces<\/a> pressing on DFAT, but focused only on the top of the list: the evolution and empowerment of Australia\u2019s presidential prime minister. Turn now to the other forces doing the scrooge on DFAT:<\/p>\n