When the cats away

The Department of Foreign Affairs is to be cut by over $100 million at a time when Australia is seeking a place on the Security Council, at a time when climate change will require a considerable input from the foreign service, including attendances at international conferences, and at a time of repositioning and increased responsibility in terms of Rudd’s revived middle power status for Australia.

The budget for the Department of Foreign Affairs now stands at around $700 million, the budget for the Australian Federal Police is close to $2 billion. The language training budget for the AFP is greater than that of Foreign Affairs, which is nonsense. If that were the case when Rudd joined the Foreign Affairs he might not be able to speak Mandarin.

If Rudd is going to develop a reputation as a Prime Minister of a middle power concerned with human rights he cannot ignore Zimbabwe. Howard avoided the problem but the extent of the looming tragedy cannot be ignored. In the light of the evident inability of the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, to act, Rudd might consider calling for a special meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government to get together and do some brainstorming over how to assist the people of Zimbabwe. He and they might seek to get the UN involved.

Ministers recently advocating a role for employers as reserve members of the security services by monitoring employee emails for terrorism tidbits, should take a cold shower. This is another power play by the head of the AFP, Keelty, with the lesser security chiefs of ASIO and ASIS doing a patsy. Computers, and therefore the state, are vulnerable but a crash of systems can come from many sources including an unreliable power supply or future rivalry between system providers.

The issue, as Kevin Rudd would be aware, is not to set up a regime where we spy on each other in order to secure our future freedoms but rather deploy and devise back up systems. But that all seems too much for Keelty who seems to have a nose for power and what comes across as a reduced notion of the importance of democracy. Perhaps the price of maintaining democracy requires that we carry the risk of being susceptible to “attack”.

Having shown the world that he is prepared and capable of taking Australia down a new and better international path, Kevin Rudd must do the same domestically.