The “Kill-ASPI” Review for the Australian Labour Government

Over 20 years, in ASPI and outside it, I have witnessed multiple attempts – almost all by the bureaucracy – to muzzle the institute.

Like me, Varghese was a career public servant. He was secretary of DFAT from 2012-16 and ran the Office of National Intelligence between 2004 and 2009.

Varghese has been chancellor of the University of Queensland since 2016, an institution that in 2023 received just over $1bn in commonwealth government funding. In February, he was charged to review government spending on “strategic policy work”, which amounts to around $40m a year distributed to a number of organisations. ASPI receives around $4m annually in “long-term funding” from Defence.

In parliament’s corridors this was dubbed the “Kill ASPI” review. ASPI’s crime was apparently to annoy Labor ministers. This included exposing China’s attempts to covertly subvert Australia’s sovereignty.

In my time at ASPI, I loudly protested an astonishing security lapse when the Port of Darwin was leased for 99 years to a Chinese company in 2015.

ASPI successfully made the case for why Chinese companies should be kept out of bidding for the 5G network rollout. We exposed the extent of the Community Party’s United Front influence work in Australia; wrote on human rights violations of the Uighur people and on China’s cyber espionage. The Chinese Community Party hated ASPI. It was included on Beijing’s November 2021 14-point “grievance list” – calling for the end of public funding of an “anti-China think tank”.

Our research on China changed policy thinking in Washington DC, London, Tokyo, and elsewhere but in Canberra the reaction from the bureaucracy ranged from open hostility to embarrassed “don’t tell anyone I said this, but keep up the great work” support.

Varghese does recognise that the work on Uighurs “was a textbook example of the sophisticated use of open sources to shed light on an otherwise opaque issue” and he says ASPI’s work on China’s foreign interference “while controversial, was groundbreaking”.

Groundbreaking maybe, but Defence and the wider bureaucracy would have vetoed that analysis if they had the power to do so.

That’s the point of a think tank – to be ahead of bureaucratic comfort zones.

The Institute’s work went well beyond China. We produced an annual plain English assessment of the Defence budget which became the “go-to” analysis for Parliamentarians and even Defence officials to understand how the money was spent. ASPI produced analysis on the costs of defence projects which Defence hated but were invariably right.

Varghese’s report highlights my own work with a curious assessment. He says I engaged in “op-ed overreach” – a reference to writing articles for this newspaper. He claims: “In many cases the op-eds were based on personal opinions rather than deep ASPI research and, in too many instances, it veered into partisan commentary and even personal criticism.”

Well, better overreach than underreach. Varghese doesn’t offer any specifics but I will acknowledge, as a friend observed, that my writing was and hopefully remains “piquant”.

As with everything ASPI did, my writing was open to criticism and received some. Writing on the issues of war, peace, money, technology and power requires broad shoulders.

The report’s purported focus is on how to manage an array of government-supported “strategic policy work” into the future.

There are 14 recommendations and the government says it “agrees”, “agrees in principle” and “notes” all of them – reflecting broad support for the proposals. Some recommendations are welcome – for example, recommending that there should be increased secondments between departments and think tanks, and that some researchers receive security clearances to enable classified work.

However, the effect of most recommendations would be to constrain the work of ASPI and other think tanks. For example, Varghese states the “Secretaries Committee on National Security should approve annual priorities for the sector”.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet lands the role to “maintain and regularly update a central database, internal to government, of all funding arrangements”. This will constrain how think tanks seek funding outside government. Why should any department have that oversight?

Most tellingly, Varghese wants a “new funding cycle (which) should involve a performance evaluation in year three and an open tender process in year four”.

Let’s imagine that the government decides it wants more oversight of the billion dollars it annually invests in the University of Queensland.

A government committee will set the annual research agenda for every UQ department; every dollar UQ raises will be reported to a central government agency. UQ management will be reorganised to “implement best-practice governance, including a skills matrix for board positions, policies governing the transparency and appropriateness of corporate, philanthropic and foreign funding”.

Once every five years UQ will face the prospect of being blown away via “an open tender process”. And, for good measure, a “government observer” will attend its most senior management meeting.

The University of Queensland would protest mightily at such government overreach. No forward-thinking researcher would want to submit to such control.

The real overreach are Varghese’s recommendations that will help government shut down informed and independent commentary about the most important strategic issues facing Australia.

More than 100 paragraphs into his report, Varghese comes to the nub of the matter: “The idea that a think tank should be shut down because the government does not like its analysis or the opinions of its executive director is a dangerous one and contrary to the value of policy contestability in a liberal democracy.”

It seems clear to me that “the idea” Varghese refers to came from those who commissioned this review. That was the purpose of it – “Kill ASPI”.

Varghese’s least worthy recommendation is to close ASPI’s office in Washington DC because “having ASPI freelance in this area only muddies the waters”. Varghese wants his old shop, DFAT, to be the sole player. This is just about turf. Just an opinion. Just overreach.

It was Peter Dutton as minister for defence who supported my proposal to open an office in Washington DC. The bureaucracy hated the idea, and still does.

The broader pattern here is of a government and a willing bureaucracy shutting down policy debate. They know best. John Howard’s idea that a think tank should offer “contestability of policy advice” is dead in Canberra.

The bureaucracy never wanted ASPI. Now they have a government glass-jawed enough in temperament and dull enough in imagination to let the Institute die a death from slow strangulation.

This article originally appeared in the Australian on 20 December 2024.