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Civil dissension is a viperous worm
That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth
William Shakespeare,
Henry VI, Part 1
The Arab Spring had spread across Tunisia and Egypt before eventually reaching Libya. Gaddafi’s repressive military regime had been in power for forty years. Rather than try to negotiate with civilian protesters, Gaddafi just opened fire.1 Hundreds were slaughtered in the streets of Tripoli as protests turned violent across the country.2 Suddenly the Gaddafi regime no longer looked impregnable, although his security forces would soon drive those supporting the uprising in Tripoli back along the road to Benghazi, a city of 650,000 and the country’s second largest, which had long been the centre of political unrest against the regime. By March 2011, Gaddafi’s forces had turned the tide of battle in and around Tripoli as Gaddafi deployed every military means possible to eliminate his political opposition once and for all.3 Gaddafi made his intentions crystal clear as he publicly declared he intended to slaughter the opposition and those who had supported them who were now cowering in Benghazi ‘like rats’.4 Gaddafi had put the world publicly on notice on what he intended to do. We had all been warned that we were about to witness what history would then describe as the ‘Benghazi massacre’.
As the foreign minister of a G20 country, I was not about to remain silent at the impending rape of Benghazi by Gaddafi’s security forces. At least not on my watch. Because the Arab Spring had continued to generate extensive international media coverage, including in Australia, both Gillard and myself were regularly asked for comment on unfolding events in Libya as the community wanted to know the Australian official response. As a result, our offices were working closely together in dealing with a rapidly unfolding crisis, albeit a long way from Australian shores. We also had an Australian consulate general in Tripoli and a number of Australian nationals in Libya for whom I was ultimately responsible. We had agreed that it was imperative we do everything possible through our international diplomacy to prevent the slaughter of the innocents in Benghazi. As this would inevitably involve action through the UN Security Council, NATO and the European Union, Australia engaged heavily with our counterparts around the world on what could be done to protect the civilian population of Libya.5
In March, in full consultation with both DFAT and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, I began publicly campaigning for a ‘no-fly zone’ to be imposed by the UN Security Council over Libya to protect Benghazi from Gaddafi’s forces.6 I knew, however, that by using the international media as much as I could, drawing on the appalling memories of both Srebrenica and Rwanda, that maximum international political pressure could be brought to bear on Moscow and Beijing to at least abstain on a Security Council resolution on a no-fly zone. I also knew that in NATO itself, there were many reservations being raised about the military implications of a no-fly zone – who would enforce it, the impact on Libyan civilians on the ground as well as the costs of doing nothing at all.7 But I was determined not to have it on my conscience that we simply stood idly by, issued the predictable press releases on the appalling events unfolding in Benghazi, while Gaddafi descended on the city where he had warned us he was about to murder its civilian population, or a large part of it. His intentions were crystal clear, both by the operations of his military and security forces on the ground, and by the statements coming from the regime in Tripoli. The international community had nowhere to hide. Although many were frantically trying to find somewhere to do so.
As we pushed the pedal on our own international campaign in support of a Libyan no-fly zone, I woke up in the morning of 11 March 2011 to screaming headlines plastered across the front of both The Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age: gillard in open conflict with rudd8 and gillard, rudd at odds on libya9. Neither Gillard, her office or her department had sought to contact me expressing any reservations about the no-fly zone proposal. Consistent with our agreed practice, we had cleared the approach first. Gillard at that stage was travelling in both Washington and New York. In Washington she had apparently picked up reservations from parts of the US administration about the risk to US personnel were they to become directly engaged in Libya and whether the Europeans would be up for it, given that Libya lay directly across the Mediterranean and well within their own zone of military operations. None of this had been reflected back to me. Besides, my own judgement remained that when balanced against what history would inevitably recall as the Benghazi Massacre, enforcing a no-fly zone against Gaddafi was the lesser of the two evils. The bottom line, however, was that I was left completely in the dark about whatever discussions Gillard had had in Washington on this subject. By the time she reached New York, where the matter was already before the UN Security Council, she also would have obviously become aware of a range of other reservations from UN member states about the implications of supporting such a decision, even though Britain and France had already drafted the authorising resolution that was before the Council for deliberation.10 Gillard took the deliberate step of briefing Phil Coorey from Fairfax – who was travelling with her party – who ran the story that I was ‘out of control on Libya’ the next day.11 I know this because Australian officials have told me, many years after the event, that they were present in the room when the briefing occurred. It was a deliberate act on her part to put her foreign minister in his place. She also chose to use her most reliable apologist in the print media, Phil Coorey, to do so. What was unfortunate was that Gillard had already agreed with my approach before she left Australia. If she had changed her mind while in the US, which she was entitled to do, she could have told me. She chose not to do so. It seems, in retrospect, that her political objective was very much focused on the home front. But in doing so she’d breached the fundamental understanding we had agreed in her office the previous September just after I became minister – that through our offices we would maintain the closest possible contact, including on any area of possible policy divergence, so there would be no surprises. That had simply not occurred in the case of Libya. She had acted unilaterally.
If Gillard wanted to publicly and formally part company with her foreign minister on the need for a no-fly zone over Libya, then I would leave it to her to do so. When she faced the media again the next day, she went to water and said it was obvious there was no divergence in the positions between us.12 Given what had just happened, this was a nonsense. She may also have begun to become nervous about where Washington would ultimately land on the subject. She may also have been aware that the call I had been publicly making for some time in support of a no-fly zone over Libya was gaining more and more international support. Robert Cooper, a senior diplomatic representative of the European Union in Brussels, indicated that my continued public advocacy indeed had some effect in shifting the international debate on the subject – particularly my public references to the likelihood that Benghazi would add its name to the sorry list of Srebrenica and Rwanda in the annals of failed international diplomacy.13 The Gulf Cooperation Council, representing the key Arab states, then came out in support of a no-fly zone.14 So too did the Arab League.15 The Europeans, with the exception of Germany, were united behind the British and French position that Gaddafi had to be stopped.16 And the Obama administration would soon come around as well. The UN Security Council resolution was eventually passed without attracting either a Russian or a Chinese veto.17 This was a remarkable diplomatic achievement for the international community, in which, at least according to Cooper, I had apparently played a small part in moving the political dial in the international debate. At last, it seemed, the international community had learned from its mistakes in previous decades.
What followed on the ground in Libya was an entirely different story. Yes, the French and British bombing raids, supported by the United States, had stopped the movement of Gaddafi’s forces towards Benghazi.18 And Benghazi was saved. The problem then became one of ‘mission overreach’ as the authorised Security Council resolution for a no-fly zone was interpreted much more broadly by the British and the French, with the support of the Americans, to bring about regime change in Tripoli itself. I fully understood the difficulty in clinically separating the defence of Benghazi on the one hand, from stopping the perpetrator of the offensive against Benghazi on the other. Nonetheless, it became clear from the targeting plans of the NATO military aircraft that it was no longer a matter of simply defending Benghazi, but also of attacking the regime’s stronghold in Tripoli, as well as arming Libyan rebel fighters of various origins on the ground as they sought then to topple the Libyan regime by armed force.19 This, as we all know from the historical record, would succeed. Gaddafi and his sons would be driven from their Tripoli redoubt. And all three would be tracked down and brutally murdered. The ‘overreach’ in the implementation of the UN Security Council resolution on the Libyan no-fly zone would become a textbook case of the dangers of taking a Security Council resolution authorising the use ‘of all necessary means’ by member states way beyond the content of the text. The problem, however, may well have become more manageable had the British, the French and the Americans deployed the same level of vigour on the ground after the conclusion of the Libyan campaign to ensure a more stable political transition within Libya itself. This did not happen. Their security commitments on the ground were half-hearted. Stung by the experience of Afghanistan, a much more hands-off approach was adopted. This, however, created a political and security vacuum within Libya. A fresh civil war erupted. And the country seven years later, after much further loss of life, still remained deeply divided.
*
My policy disagreements with Gillard were not restricted to Libya. Gillard had also disagreed with my handling of the future of the Australia Network, Australia’s international television broadcasting service which had been in operation, in one form or another, since 1993. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had held the Australia Network tender for the previous five years.20 It was now time to renew the tender. I had always wanted to grow the service so that Australia, both in the region and the world, would have a recognisable international broadcasting name, comparable to Deutsche Welle, France TV or the BBC. Or at least something comparable to these brands in the wider Asia-Pacific Region, where Australia’s interests were most at stake. I wanted to see the ABC continue to have the contract and also to be properly funded for the long-term expansion of its international services. I was disturbed when Gillard, during our first discussion of my portfolio responsibilities in her office in late September 2010, had raised the Australia Network tender with me. She told me that she had had discussions on the network’s future with News Limited over the previous several months. She had promised them that she would put the contract out to open tender and that their bid would be properly considered by the government in the context of any other bids received. My own view had always been that we were within our rights to simply roll over the ABC’s existing contract for a further five years, or possibly longer. Indeed, Gillard told me that the next contract period should be for ten years. But then she stunned me by saying that while we needed to have an open tender to satisfy News Limited’s interests, when it came to the decision, the ABC should be awarded the contract.
When I went back to my office, I asked to see the secretary of my department, Dennis Richardson. I was going to recuse myself from any further involvement in the decision-making process. I did not want to be party to a tendering procedure with a predetermined outcome. I wanted the cabinet to receive the full benefit of an independent, bureaucratic committee’s analysis of the various bids that would be received for the future provision of the service. Obviously, Sky News, which at that stage was partly owned by News Limited, would be putting in tenders. So would the ABC. So, potentially, would others. Because the funding for the Australia Network, as in the past, would come through the Department of Foreign Affairs portfolio, it was important that we provided the best advice possible to government on the way forward. Richardson agreed with my approach and duly constituted an independent panel of other public servants, both serving and retired, to help with the decision-making process. I took the precaution of then corresponding with the prime minister to tell her what arrangements I had put in place, advising her that the Richardson panel’s recommendations would then be available for the cabinet.
I had no further involvement in the matter whatsoever. By mid-year, Richardson’s panel had spent many months examining both the Sky News and ABC submissions. Their conclusion was that the Sky News submission had real advantages over the ABC. At my request, they notified both the prime minister’s office and Conroy, the communication minister, with the results of the panel’s deliberations. Both Gillard and Conroy were apoplectic. This was not how it was all supposed to turn out. The bureaucrats were supposed to have just recommended the ABC. That too was my personal preference given my well-known, long-standing commitment to the public broadcaster. But if Gillard and Conroy had wanted the ABCs contract renewed, they should have simply done so rather than go through a public tendering process for largely political presentational reasons – i.e. to make it look to News Limited that their bid had been properly taken into account. In May 2011, Gillard and Conroy brought the matter to cabinet. I made plain to the cabinet the position I had put to Gillard in correspondence and that I had recused myself from being the decision-maker, in which case it would fall to cabinet. Gillard then decided that Conroy should become the decision-maker, rather than the cabinet, but this would require a further extension of the tender process as well as an adjustment to the terms of reference to widen the ‘national interest’ considerations that would be taken into account. This was made plain in a joint press statement between Gillard, Conroy and myself on 24 June 2011.21 I was glad to have been relieved of all responsibility of the matter.
However, both Fairfax and News Limited began to report that Richardson’s independent panel had recommended in favour of Sky News and against the ABC.22 This created additional political and media pandemonium for both Gillard and Conroy. So much so that by the time we got to November 2011, Conroy decided to formally abolish the tender process altogether.23 Conroy stated the reasons for so doing was because of ‘significant leaks of confidential information’.24 His borderline defamatory implication was that I was somehow responsible. He was wrong. I do know, however, that the officials who undertook the review were outraged. Conroy went on to say, ‘the Australia Network tender process has been compromised to such a degree that a fair and equitable outcome will no longer be able to be achieved’.25 The practical result of Conroy’s decision was that this $223 million tender would be rolled over till August the following year, by which time government would make a final decision. In the end, the ABC would be awarded the ten-year contract.26 This, in my view, should have been the decision from the outset. After all, if this was to be funded by the taxpayer, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and it was conceived from the get-go as an exercise in Australia’s regional public diplomacy, it was inconceivable that we should hand the contract over to a private provider, let alone one with such skewed corporate interests as News Limited whose hostility to the future of any form of public broadcasting was well documented. It was just nuts. Yet all done in order to appease some commitment to the Murdoch media moguls prior to the 2010 election that there would be a tendering process while the answer, it seemed, had already been predetermined.
*
In February 2012, I would embark on my last international mission as Australian foreign minister. I was off to Los Carbos in Mexico. I had undertaken a bilateral visit to Mexico before to begin building our relationship with an important G20 partner. That’s why I had also spent time elsewhere in Latin America, most particularly in Brazil, with then-President Lula. Brazil was also another important partner for us in the future evolution of the G20. I had been determined to expand our broader relationship with Latin America given that this vast continent of more than 600 million people would, like Africa, become a major political force and economic partner for the future. As an observer, I had attended the conference of the Mercosur countries at Iguazu Falls in 2010. Just as I had attended a conference of the central American foreign ministers in Guatemala later that year. I had also done my bit to expand our broader relationship with the countries of Latin America by creating the Australia Americas Awards, based on the Australia Awards, so that we would have one hundred scholarships each year to distribute to students across the continent. If we were to have influence on the major global debates affecting our future, our programs needed to have global reach.
But this visit to Los Cabos would not be about our bilateral interests in Mexico or our broader interest in Latin American. The Los Carbos meeting was convened by my Mexican counterpart Patricia Espinosa as a G20 foreign ministers meeting. This was an important initiative. This would be the first occasion since the G20 was established in 2008 where the foreign ministers would meet in formal session. It was part of an agenda I’d been developing with my foreign ministerial counterparts to add a political and diplomatic arm to the G20 process. It was about ‘thickening’ the institutional agenda around the G20 – to take it beyond its narrower financial and economic origins. After all, this is what had happened with the evolution of the G7. I had a productive bilateral meeting with Hillary Clinton while there. More importantly, we all spent time together over drinks in a free-ranging conversation about the unfolding global agenda. This included the Syrian situation, which was in the process of exploding, where I introduced Hillary to my Syrian–Australian media adviser, Ranya Alkadamani, to explain what was unfolding in her native villages in the south of the country back home. The informality of these gatherings was important in creating a new esprit de corps for a nascent international institution where we had vital interests at stake.
But the most important thing about this particular gathering was that it was the first opportunity where I was able to convene a separate meeting of what I would call the M6, the middle powers grouping of six states. This would include Australia, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Turkey, Mexico and Argentina. I had conceived of this as a grouping of middle powers within the framework of the G20. It would not be locked into either the original G7 camp, or the five countries that made up the BRICS. Our value was to be a group of states who had a deep vested institutional interest in developing the G20 over time to become a mechanism through which global consensus could be forged on the hard questions on the international economic agenda; as well as a ginger group for resolving some of the more complex non-economic policy challenges facing the G20 heads of government, including climate change. I saw it as an exercise in long-term institution building. I presented a paper which I had prepared on the subject. This was accepted by my foreign ministerial counterparts. And so was born what I call the M6, or the Middle 6. And what Julie Bishop would later call MIKTA. I give her full marks for sustaining the integrity of this initiative on a bipartisan basis. MIKTA continues to this day. Alas, I would not last long as foreign minister. Not long enough, at least, to see this institution develop more fully. Gillard had other things planned for my future back on the home front.