Defence

Feature

Enhancing our policy standing

The February edition of Defence Magazine highlighted "enhancing our policy standing" as one of the three key themes on which the Defence Priorities 2005 were developed. But what's policy work really all about? How is it different from political advice? What are the implications for Defence in an increasingly contestable policy environment? The Secretary, Ric Smith, gives his view...

Photo by Steve Dent

Policy sets the parameters for everything we do in Defence. Policy work is not easy, you have to work at it. You rarely get comfortable - it's a very dynamic environment. Policy advising and implementing is more pervasive in our organisation than I suspect many of our colleagues appreciate. It's certainly not limited to our International Policy and Strategic Policy divisions. Operational and management areas obviously have big responsibilities.

In isolating 'policy' as one area of priority for the organisation, we've used the word 'enhancing'. But this is not to suggest that our people are behind the play. In the sort of policy advising environment we find ourselves in - with key players competing for influence, with inputs constantly changing and public scrutiny becoming ever more intense - it's necessary for us to continue to build our effectiveness, our skills and acumen.

There is a range of policy advising responsibilities - when you think about it, it's remarkably wide. At the highest level there is capability development and the strategic scene-setting that precedes it. It also includes advising on various deployments, and the likely benefits and risks of them. It includes the management of Defence aspects of international relationships and interests. That, incidentally, is a different matter from "foreign policy as given from Russell." We have to ensure that we're not simply seen as a service provider for the policy departments. We need to have our own defined set of Defence interests to which we relate advice on international policy and other issues - things like the Law of Armed Conflict, the sorts of weapons that can be used or can't, how prisoners may be treated, and so on.

At home, issues like Defence aid to the civil community often raise very tricky policy questions, and as well there is a range of very demanding policy issues in the area of management, including of course personnel management - if I can be a bit topical with a couple of examples, Military Justice and OH&S.

I should say in all of this what policy is and isn't. Policy is not the same thing as politics. For English language speakers, the words have quite different meanings. In Defence, 'policy' is what we're talking about. That's not to say that policy advisers shouldn't be conscious of the political environment - they're working in it, so of course they have to be aware of the wider environment. I recall when I was here in Defence back in the 1990s, I was visited by a very senior uniformed officer who asked if I could add some "political advice" to a submission he was doing. I had to say "I'm sorry mate, I don't do politics, I do policy". (I think he thought I was being a bit of a smart aleck and I wasn't, I meant that. Nobody in their right mind would seek political advice from me.) Partisan political inputs should come not from us, but from ministers and their staff, and we should not try to anticipate or pre-empt a minister's approach to them.

Photo by Steve Dent

We say often that Australia's strategic environment is increasingly complex and challenging. In fact, people have said that every year since 1945, which doesn't make it any less true. The same can be said of our policy advising environment. It's enormous, it's growing and it's becoming more complex as the focus of government attention has shifted from Defence, in its narrower sense, to a focus on security more broadly. So our role, our functions and the expectations of us have changed. We now dominate only one sector of the security debate. You could describe it as the Defence sector, but there are many other interconnected sectors within the security pie. We certainly play in the wider security debate and we're very big players in it, but we're not the only players, or always the most important. In a policy advising sense this requires us to work not just with PM&C, DFAT and the Attorney-General's Departments, but also with agencies like the AFP, AusAID, ASIO and others to have an understanding of the different legal frameworks they work in, the different cultures, their strengths and weaknesses. All this requires an enormous amount more consultation than was previously the case.

Increasingly too, we're having to work with other agencies in the capability development and acquisition areas. I won't traverse the history of why that's so, but the fact is the Government wants agencies such as PM&C, Finance and Treasury and so on to have more visibility of our processes. That in turn naturally leads into questioning on the underlying basis of our advice and the need to grow their own skills and influence in those areas. So there's more contestability from within Government as a result. But there's also more contestability of Defence advice from outside of Government. It comes obviously from bodies like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, set up by the Government for the very specific purpose of contestability of advice, and from other think tanks and lobby organisations. It also comes from individuals, some of them quite influential. This contestability is amplified by the media cycle these days - a 24/7 multi-media affair means getting talking heads on the air as instant experts.

Finally, there's more scrutiny of our policy advice than ever. This of course is true in the higher realms of policy and with respect to involvement in Iraq, but it's especially so in those areas of management policy and it comes increasingly from parliamentary committees as well as from the media. It is a policy reality that we work within a much more complex environment and to work in that we have to be fast moving, imaginative, creative, competitive and, above all, smart in the sense of being street-smart.

An excerpt from a speech by the Secretary of Defence, Ric Smith, in February this year

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