Dutton's Darkness Dumbs Down Defence Department

If hard working public servants in Australia's Department of Defence had reason to hope their new Minister, Peter Dutton, might be a breath of fresh air, think again. Dutton sees himself as merely doing time ministering to rather large government departments (was Home Affairs now running Defence) on the way to his true goal, the Top Job, the Prime Ministership. 

Kym Bergmann, editor of Australia's exceptional Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter(APDR), (No.1 in my "Favorite Books" list) has writing an excellent commentary deftly disclosing details of what may await the doting Departmental denizens of Darth Vader Dutton. 

Kym wrote on May 16, 2021: 

"OPINION: Is the Defence Department heading for a major shakeup?" 

"In Canberra we always like a good structure of government story, even if it might be a bit of a yawn for ordinary Australians.  The rumour currently doing the rounds is that new Defence Minister Peter Dutton is planning an assault on the department – not in the physical sense but some sort of major shakeup of its structure and leadership.  This does not come directly from the Minister, who is generally contemptuous of the media and averse to even basic scrutiny, but from the inner circle privy to his thinking.

Some of this might be coming from the head of his former Department of Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo, who recently made headlines with his views that the drums of war are beating loudly.  He spent the formative years of his career in Defence and has long been suspected of wanting to return as the head of it but has so far not succeeded.  It has been unkindly suggested that since he is unable to control the Army from his current position, he has created a substitute in the form of the armed, black uniformed Border Force.

It is possible that journalists who are starved of information are talking up the possibility of major changes without a lot of hard data. [Dutton's Minister of Defence] office will not answer emails, phone calls or texts from most sections of the media – it being unclear what they actually do with their time – with the partial exception of a couple of stenographers able to accurately record the thoughts of their boss.  The Minister himself largely limits his appearances to right wing radio chat shows that typically feature introductions along the lines of “why don’t you tell the listeners how good you are and what a wonderful job the government is doing.”

Cartoon courtesy "First Dog on the Moon" published via The Guardian.
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The real Peter Dutton smiling with veiled belligerence.
(Photo courtesy The Guardian)
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To choke off any useful information about Defence reaching the general public – even for positive stories – the Minister has issued an instruction to the Department containing the following extremely restrictive measures when responding to requests for information:

*   Responses are to be as brief and succinct as possible

*   Guidance is to limit responses to three paras, regardless of the breadth of the
     question(s); additional information can be offered on background

*   Capability-related interviews are unlikely to be approved, be rigidly flexible to revert to
     written responses.

Updating a major program in three paragraphs is impossible.

This instruction has had the immediate and chilling effect of shutting down the flow of information about projects because people in uniform who have an instinctive wariness of the media now have justification for providing minimal information – or as is increasingly the case, none at all.  Ironically the quoted memo was leaked to a journalist. Leaving aside the issue of what “rigidly flexible” could possibly mean, we are entering a dark period were Australians will be denied any information about where $40 billion of taxpayer’s money is going every year.

While this might sound like a few journalists sulking, it is far more than that because Defence is not only responsible for national security – admittedly a lot of which is highly classified, for good reason – but also for managing huge acquisition programs for ships, planes and vehicles.  Some of them are extremely poorly managed and deserve scrutiny; many are going well and the public, as well as the broader defence community including industry and academia, are curious about what is happening.

This has us circling back to the possibility of structural changes to the Department.  One school of thought says why bother with a Federal election less than a year away – but others argue that change is long overdue and that with billions of dollars wasted on procurement mismanagement the country cannot afford for Defence to remain on its current trajectory for a day longer.

No better example can be supplied than the ongoing revelations about LAND 200 and the withdrawal from service at Army’s direction of the Elbit Battle Management System, the subject of the main story in this edition.  By rights the program should have been cancelled in 2019 after a highly critical and detailed report from the ANAO.  To be fair, at that time Army announced a pause of the next part of the contract, which was set to cost Australia another $1 billion on top of the $2 billion already invested.

It is only due to the media that the Australian public are now getting a sense of the extraordinary events that have been taking place with Army’s signature digitisation program – a key ingredient for combat capability – and which has come to a total, shuddering halt.  Even worse, there is no viable alternative readily available, and the way forward seems opaque.  To make matters worse, Army then started selectively leaking information that the system is being withdrawn because of concerns that the software might have some sort of back door that could be used to access secure US networks when connected with them.  There will now need to be a major investigation into who knew what and when inside Defence – especially CASG – and Parliament House.

Elbit has reacted with fury, absolutely denying the allegations about security concerns and pointing out that not only has this been a collaborative program with the Army but that all source code has been transferred to Australia.

If it were up to Defence and the government, all of this would have been hushed up.  There has been no official announcement about the situation even though Army had made the decision about withdrawing it from service last December.  Should the Minister be looking for a good excuse to launch into the Department, this will be it.  To it should be added the Attack class submarine program that is consuming billions of dollars with seemingly very little accountability.

It’s time for everyone to be reminded of the old saying about the best disinfectant being sunlight."