07/11/2021

(AU ABC) Morrison's Glasgow Trip Raises Troubling Questions About Climate Change, National Security And How The Government Should Be Judged

ABC News - Laura Tingle

Scott Morrison's disastrous overseas trip has seen him portrayed as a significantly reduced figure on both the domestic and international stages. (ABC News: Adam Kennedy)

Author
Laura Tingle is ABC 7.30's chief political correspondent.
Scott Morrison believes in miracles.

This is perhaps why he expected us all to ignore what we had seen with our own eyes this week and instead believe him when he quivered with outrage that French President Emmanuel Macron had questioned "Australia's integrity".

It was the Prime Minister, of course, who was in Macron's sights in Rome this week — not the Australian nation — when he was questioned about the cancellation of a $90 billion submarine contract — the largest in Australia's history.

Did he think Scott Morrison had lied to him about the future of the deal, Macron was asked by reporters in Rome. "I don't think, I know," he had replied.

By the time Morrison got to Glasgow, the PM's dander was in full dudgeon mode, on a scale that only someone who had once been an amateur musical theatre thespian could muster.

"I must say that I think the statements that were made questioning Australia's integrity, and the slurs that have been placed on Australia, not me, I've got broad shoulders, I can deal with that," he said. "But those slurs, I'm not going to cop sledging at Australia. I'm not going to cop that on behalf of Australians."

Emmanuel Macron calls Scott Morrison a liar following nuclear submarines spat. Youtube

This unedifying spectacle, along with the PM's apparently approved leaking of text messages from another national leader, have this week been analysed in two very different ways which reflect two strands of national conversation about politics that have perhaps never seemed to diverge quite as much as they do right now.

On the one hand, there is the strand of discourse about what are Australia's underlying national interests. On the other is the strand shaped by politics, character tests, pragmatism, spin and popularity.

A spotlight on two important issues

Morrison's disastrous overseas trip has seen him portrayed as a significantly reduced figure on both the domestic and international stages. There were two important issues under the spotlight on this trip: climate change and the credibility of our national security strategy.

On climate change, the UN conference in Glasgow — like the ones that have preceded it — was seen as a test against which all governments would be judged in terms of what they are doing to reduce greenhouse emissions.

A lot of governments scored very mediocre results in those tests, none more so than Australia.

But something that has changed since the Paris conference in 2015 is that it is not just Australia's failure to meet the targets set down for the Glasgow conference that has been on display this time around, but that government policy isn't even meeting the targets set down by the broader Australian leadership: everyone from our scientists to now even the business and financial communities.

Scott Morrison puts faith in technology for decarbonisation

Instead of making an assessment of where Australia's national interest might lie — not just in terms of reduced emissions but in helping the transition which is being forced upon us by markets and the rest of the world — the government took a policy position to Glasgow completely framed by wedge politics and internal government political problems.

On national security, what we have witnessed is even more troubling.

In announcing in September the decision to dump the French submarine contract, and instead pursue nuclear submarines in a new pact with the United Kingdom and the United States, Australia was realigning its strategic view, we were told.

This view meant we needed to have nuclear submarine capability, as well as a range of different forms of technology and armaments that only the US and the UK could provide.

Jo Dodds wants Scott Morrison to do more about climate change, so she went to Glasgow. Read more
Bolstering this case was a campaign to portray the French as a partner that was not delivering on time or on budget, and that we would be "safer" with the US, firmly entrenched in a partnership in the region.

Yet evidence to Senate committee hearings in the past fortnight have emphasised the French were indeed delivering what they had promised. 

Meanwhile, the Australian mishandling of the relationship with the French saw the US President publicly disowning the process; the Prime Minister was not able to have a meeting with Joe Biden at two major international summits; and Australia leaked an American national security document in an effort to try to prove the US was "in" on the deceit of the French.

This was all in addition to the PM apparently leaking a text message from Macron which will do little to make other world leaders trust him in future.

A seriously alarming development

All this is of particular concern when the passage of just of a couple of months has left grave doubts about the outlook for our strategic capability in the wake of the decision to so significantly rewrite our strategic policy.

Not only do we now have a widely acknowledged "capability gap" in our submarine fleet until 2040 — on the off chance that we ever actually see these nuclear submarines.

But no analyst will put up their hand to say these submarines will be built in Australia, and too many doubt whether there is the capacity to actually build them anywhere else, given the demands of other nations to build their own submarines.

Can the submarines even be built in Adelaide? (AP: Jack Sauer)
This should be a seriously alarming development. Yet instead, submarines and security strategy, like climate change, are fought out in that other strand of the national discourse, a strand where some of our most senior journalists say that "of course" Morrison had to lie to the French, and senior ministers say it is journalists' fault that the relationship with the French has gone downhill because they "pressured" Macron by asking him questions.

The 18-month review of the plan to go nuclear puts the answer to the question on the other side of the election, including an answer we know already but which the government won't admit to until then because of what it means for seats in Adelaide: submarines will not, cannot, be built there.

Why aren't the disturbing aspects of both the climate change and strategic positions of the government under more intense pressure?

Biden says AUKUS pact was 'clumsy'

Labor is keeping itself purely in the political strand of the conversations here: it doesn't want to challenge the government on national security, or find itself exposed by making a major point of difference on emissions reduction policies.

It attacks the Prime Minister on character grounds over the debacle over the submarine strategy, revelling in claims on the international stage that he is a liar, rather than raising the alarm about how his actions have exposed our national security and that, just maybe, the Opposition should be rethinking its original endorsement of the change of strategy.

So many threads of the Prime Minister's political strategy — as well as the national interest — have started to fray in recent times: a campaign fought on national security grounds; a "who do you trust" campaign. That's just for starters.

But somewhere along the way, the idea that he and his government should be judged in terms of how they are protecting the national interest, rather than playing the political game, seems to have been well and truly lost.

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