Australia’s intelligence community sails through another major blunder

The ability of Australia’s intelligence agencies to make blunder after blunder and not merely never be held accountable but to continue to be held in almost untouchable esteem by politicians and the media is a striking and unusual feature of Australian politics.

The past quarter century has seen a litany of intelligence bungles and scandals that have cost lives, damaged Australia’s interests and harmed other countries as well. In no instance — even in the most scandalous and criminal conduct — has anyone in what is called the “Australian intelligence community” been held to account.

The Solomon Islands’ deal with China is another addition to that storied history of failure, Australia being taken by surprise by the revelation that its government had negotiated an agreement with China involving ship visits, logistical replenishment and other related activities.

Two of Australia’s most senior intelligence officials, director-general of ASIS Paul Symon and long-time Coalition national security apparatchik Andrew Shearer, travelled to the Solomons last week to pressure Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare over the agreement.

But greater pressure will be exerted by the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, veteran Asia-Pacific diplomat Kurt M Campbell, who is travelling to the Solomons this month, according to the Financial Times.

The dispatch of Campbell to clean up Australia’s mess is humiliating for us: the US has relied on Australia to manage the region while it could divert diplomatic and security resources elsewhere. Instead Australia had little warning of a deal giving China access to a Pacific port.

Bearing in mind that — as the Snowden material revealed the priority of international intelligence agencies like ASIS appears to be commercial espionage — there’s a legitimate question as to what exactly ASIS was doing while China and the Sogavare were negotiating a deal.

The failure is of sufficient magnitude — particularly after what is now years of warnings and bellicose rhetoric from the government about the threat posed by China — that it deserves parliamentary scrutiny. As Crikey has noted repeatedly in the past, Australia is the only Five Eyes country without a worthwhile system of parliamentary oversight of intelligence agencies — and certainly nothing to compare with congressional oversight of the US intelligence community.

But it’s worth reflecting on the context of the deal, which supposedly gives China a precious foothold in the region. Why would the Solomon Islands government be happy to embrace China? Chinese aid largely stays in the Solomon Islands, but Australian aid does not.

During the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), about half the aid went towards the salaries of the Australian Federal Police. Some of the remainder went to paying advisers to the public service, employing magistrates and running the country’s prison system. It was a classic form of “boomerang aid” in the region that Australia has long specialised in, since most of the foreign consultants or in-line appointees were Australian anyway. As Aid/Watch, the aid-monitoring group put it, Australia was “the largest direct recipient of its own aid funding”.

Australia has also acted, almost reflexively, as an imperial power in the region. In 2017 the Solomon Islands sought to build an undersea internet cable with funding from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Australia, the third-biggest ADB shareholder after Japan and the United States, insisted on deciding which company would get the contract. When Sogavare preferred Huawei as the better value-for-money contrast, the ADB withdrew its funding and then-head of ASIS Nick Warner was dispatched in June 2017 to warn Sogavare against choosing Huawei.

After that, rumours about bribery involving Huawei and Sogavare began circulating, before Sogavare was removed from office in a vote of no confidence. The new prime minister locked Huawei out of the project and Australia stepped in to pay for almost the entire project, using the foreign aid budget. Unsurprising, it awarded the contract for the scoping study to an Australian telecommunications firm, Vocus.

When Sogavare returned to power in 2019, he clearly hadn’t forgotten that episode. Worse, Australia has treated the existential threat of global warming and rising sea levels to Pacific Island states as an irrelevance in its headlong quest to exploit its fossil fuel resources as effectively as possible.

Treated with contempt by an imperial power, the Sogavare government has tried to diversify its strategic partnerships.

The failure in the Solomon Islands was not just one of our intelligence agencies, but of our political elite and its fossil fuel controllers as well.