Speech

16 May 2006, Wollongong

Speech to the University of Wollongong Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention

Inaugural Lecture on National and International Security

Professor Gerard Sutton (Vice Chancellor, University of Wollongong).

Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (Senator for NSW)

John Sharp (former Coalition Government Cabinet Minister)

Susan Chapman (Deputy Chancellor, University of Wollongon)

Nicholas Cowdery, QC (Director of Public Prosecutions, NSW)

Dr Michael Leupold, Director of the Federal Office of Justice, Switzerland

Associate Professor Douglas MacKinnon, Director of the Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you Professor Sutton for the invitation to visit this beautiful city in this beautiful part of the world.

Wollongong University is what I would call a young university. I would call it a young university because it was established the year I was born.

It is also a very international university, with one-third international students.

It is no surprise that international students love to study at Wollongong, with its great natural beauty and good weather.

So it is appropriate that I give this lecture on National and International Security in this town that highlights what Australia has to offer.

I was very pleased that the Budget last week provided $12 million for the University to provide a new building for the Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention.

The Centre will be an important national resource in the fight against transnational crime.

It will also be an important international resource, contributing to the global debate on best practice approaches to dealing with trans-boundary threats.

I know that you already have a cohort of international students here in Wollongong, studying with their counterparts from Australian law enforcement agencies.

I understand there are 19 AusAID funded students from Indonesia, the Philippines, China and Pakistan and they are studying courses such as a Masters in Transnational Crime Prevention and Forensic Accounting.

I'm pleased to announce today that the Government will fund a further 41 places over the next two years to take the total to 60 places.

These places will be directed to priority countries and agencies in our region in consultation with the Centre.

The additional scholarships highlight the Government's commitment to building capacity in Australia and internationally in these areas which are critical to international and national security.

International security is a big field, so I would like to focus my remarks in part on the importance of capacity building for countries facing transnational threats such as terrorism and transnational crime.

The Government is putting a lot of effort into this area. Capacity building and nation building are crucial elements in any national security strategy.

But first, let me put this commitment into a wider analytical framework and to explain the close link between Australia's national security and international security.

National Security and International Security

Since the end of the Cold War we have faced a significantly altered security environment.

The international security outlook has changed in two main ways.

First, the traditional balance of power politics that guided the management of the international security system has become less intense.

No longer are there two nuclear powers vying for dominance. We've stepped well back from the brink of nuclear war, a threat we lived with through forty years of the Cold War.

We have seen a decline in the numbers of wars between states and even in the number and intensity of civil wars.

In the 1950s and 1960s, 200,000 people a year were being killed in wars; since 1990 the total has averaged 90,000 according to a recent Canadian study.

So, contrary to what we might think from the popular press, the world has actually become a more peaceful place.

But there remain a whole set of challenges for foreign and security policy-makers in the management of relations between states.

For example, the rise of China and India is set to play a major role in reshaping the regional and global balance of power.

Throughout history, whenever there has been a rising major power and consequently a redistribution of power in the world, there is always a risk of tension and friction emerging.

There are ways of dealing with this potential friction. In the case of China, Australia's view is that containment is not a sound approach.

I might say this is the view of the United States as well.

Rather, we should look to maximise cooperation with new powers and harness the forces of globalisation and integration to get these new powers fully integrated into the international system.

The more engaged are China and India, the more they will develop a strong stake in effective international solutions to contemporary problems.

International relations theory and practical experience give us a range of tools for dealing with relations among states.

But scholars and practitioners are still in the early stages of developing the tools for managing events in an era where - in addition to states - non-state actors are playing a much more significant role in international politics.

Since September 11, 2001 we have come to face a new challenge for national and international security.

While terrorism itself as a tactic is not new, the global nature of the threat and of the radical terrorist ideology that underpins it is new.

The global nature of the threat has elevated terrorism to a level where it has an effect upon the trajectory of international relations.

There is also the prospect of extremists gaining access to weapons of mass destruction, which they have already declared they would use if they could.

The challenges of non-state actors and of irregular warfare is part of what the eminent scholar Lawrence Freedman has called "the transformation of strategic affairs".

Now, to some extent this is an issue to be dealt with by traditional police, counter-terrorism and military forces.

But we also need to go beyond traditional measures because what we face in a way is a global insurgency.

And insurgency theory tells us that you don't just use security forces to defeat an insurgency, you also need to win the battle of ideas or what we used to call "hearts and minds".

The ideologies of Al Qaeda - and their religious affiliates such as Jemaah Islamiyah -invite followers to blame the west for all their grievances and frustrations.

They offer simplistic and impractical solutions to complex problems. In the face of such tactics, law enforcement work has to be matched by persuasion at the ideological level.

It will take strong voices, most particularly from moderate Islam, to quieten the voices of extremism.

The second main new dimension in international security is the challenge of weak and failing states and how to deal with them.

The September 11 attacks changed the way we think about weak states and their possible effect on international security.

States can be weakened by numerous factors including internal political strife, corruption, poor governance, inter-ethnic or inter-religious rivalries.

Once weakened, they often stay weak for a long time. International studies suggest that post-conflict societies remain highly prone to slipping back into conflict.

And conflict tends to breed a constituency for belligerency. By that I mean that the militia groups who take part in the conflict often have a lot to gain from perpetuating the fighting.

It becomes profitable to be a militia leader in Lebanon in the 1980s or Somalia in the 1990s.

In Afghanistan, the perpetual weakness of the state in the 1990s led to the Taliban take-over, with tragic results.

The lesson Australia has taken out of the events in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia is that the costs of allowing states to fail are too great.

Preventing state failure is a far better course of action.

Even within robust nation states, trans-national criminals and terrorists can exploit weak government capacity.

In most developing countries we see government institutions struggle to deliver services under severe financial constraints and with staff that lack training and experience.

For the international community as a whole, and for Australia in particular, it is therefore a matter of both national and international security that countries work together to strengthen law enforcement and counter-terrorism capabilities in all countries.

Otherwise, any weak link that remains will doubtless be exploited.

Nation Building and Capacity Building

National and international security are closely linked. No country, least of all Australia, can shut itself off from global security challenges and expect to maintain its security.

This applies to economic security, defence, law and order, border protection, health and the environment.

Strong customs, quarantine, policing and intelligence will have an effect against a range of threats.

It is these same institutions that buttress a country against terrorism, weapons proliferation, people smuggling, transnational crime and even the cross border spread of pandemics.

Border Security and Counter-terrorism

A good example of the work that Australia does with its international partners is the capacity building we do with border security agencies in the region.

Border security is an essential element of an effective counter-terrorism strategy.

In any country at risk, agencies need to be able to detect and prevent the movement of terrorists, their supporters, equipment and money.

The good work done in one country to disrupt terrorist networks, training and operations can be undermined if terrorists trained in other countries can cross borders with impunity.

This is a particular problem in the tri-border region between southern Philippines, North-East Indonesia and East Malaysia…

…where the many movements of people and goods on a variety of routes provide a serious challenge for border control agencies.

Tackling this problem requires two areas of work, both of which Australia is supporting in partnership with the region.

First, countries need the expertise and resources to secure borders effectively.

Second, they need to cooperate with one another. They need to share information and intelligence about people movements and they need to operate compatible systems.

Building these capabilities, using the expertise and resources of Australian agencies, is a key element of our regional counter-terrorism strategy. For example:

• In the Philippines, the Department of Immigration (DIMA) provides training in document fraud analysis and has provided two document fraud laboratories with specialised software.
• An Australian Customs-led project in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia is improving border control at key ports in the Sulu-Celebes Seas area.
• DOTARS - the Department of Transport and Regional Services - has a capacity-building program for regional port and aviation security that builds upon wider work being carried out under APEC.
• Defence provides maritime security training to the Philippines Navy and Coastguard and will shortly be helping to build capability in watercraft use for the Philippines Armed Forces in the south where environmental conditions for intercepting terrorists are difficult.

You can probably see a pattern developing here.

The capacity building work is conducted using Australian agencies, which build close partnerships with their regional counterparts.

It is supported by intelligence agencies here and in the region, which have also forged closer links in recent years.

It is also coordinated closely with other external donors such as the US and Japan.

The government-to-government cooperative approach is important because projects are also aimed at building better inter-agency coordination within partner countries and between agencies in the region.

It only goes as far and as fast as countries in the region are comfortable.

Over time, the aim is to build formal and informal networks of cooperation around the region.

Nation-building: Solomon Islands and beyond

In some cases the capability of a state falls below the level in which just capacity-building will be sufficient.

In some cases the state is unable to fulfil the basic tasks of nationhood and a major program of nation-building is required.

Over the past 10 years we've been engaged in such programs in East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and Solomon Islands.

The situation in Solomon Islands in 2003 was an example of a state that had effectively failed.

The budget was no longer a vehicle for delivering services to the population, but was being hijacked by ex-militants and police demanding special allowances.

The police force was heavily tainted. Ministers were corruptly granting tax exemptions to business. Effective government had become impossible.

At this point, Australia and the Pacific region were faced with a choice of whether to act to recover the situation or to allow the country to gradually sink into anarchy.

It has been a long and hard road to restore to the Solomon Islands Government the capacity to deliver its mandate.

The recent unrest shows that there is still some considerable way to go before law and order can be guaranteed.

Political reform is clearly also needed if politicians are to regain the trust of the population, which reacted so negatively to the election of the Prime Minister in April.

But no one ever argued that nation building was easy.

This applies equally to East Timor, where problems in the security forces triggered the recent unrest in Dili.

Progress is being made in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in these places too, a long term commitment from the international community is required to see the process through.

The launch of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) marked a new willingness of the Government to become more actively engaged in nation building in the Pacific.

It also broke new ground in its approach.

The extensive involvement of Australian Government agencies in the process is something quite new.

The Australian Federal Police manage the program to restore law and order and rebuild the local police force, with support from Defence.

The Budget Stabilisation Program of RAMSI was largely staffed and managed by the Australian Departments of Treasury and Finance.

This is a new and quite unique approach, managed as a whole-of-government enterprise with coordination by DFAT and AusAID.

Whether it's Solomon Islands or Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to stay the course and we will do so.

In the Budget we announced that we will open an Embassy in Kabul this year.

We've decided to deploy 240 Defence personnel to the Dutch-led Provincial Reconstruction Team in southern Afghanistan.

Our commitment to Iraq is also firm.

We currently have around 1400 defence force personnel involved with the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Iraq, including 470 in the Al Muthanna Task Group in southern Iraq.

To back out of Iraq now would be to invite disaster.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Australia's national security cannot be divorced from the international security environment.

This central premise informs our foreign policy approach.

This in itself is not new. What is new is the type of threats faced by the international community.

Because they are trans-boundary in nature, combating these threats requires countries to work more closely together than ever before.

It requires a building of capacity to tackle threats across the region.

It requires a global effort to support weak states and prevent state failure.

Most of all, it requires a long term commitment, for these problems show no sign of dissipating any time soon.

This University's work through the Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention is a model for the way forward and I'm very pleased to be able to support it.

Thank you.

ENDS