The Adolescent Country Quotes

“When Kevin Rudd announced that Australia would bid for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council Tony Abbott announced his immediate opposition. The bid would be abandoned in the event of a Coalition victory at the 2010 election, he pledged. The total cost was then estimated at perhaps $40 million, though ended up at around $25 million.16 For perspective, the Victorian Government spent $56.7 million to subsidise the Grand Prix in 2012 alone.17”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“For instance, was it wise for Tony Abbott to announce to the House that the federal police had set up counter-terrorism units to intercept would-be jihadis at Sydney and Melbourne airports and that other airports would follow later? Or was it a premature disclosure that tipped off terrorists to escape detection by using Brisbane or Adelaide instead?”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“When he returned from a September 2014 trip to India and Malaysia, Abbott had made exactly as many overseas trips as Kevin Rudd in his first year. Eleven.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“Australia’s default stance in its dealings with the world is not one of leadership. More often, it is derivative and responsive. It usually takes its lead from the United States when it can and deals with crises when it must. Or as the former director-general of the Office of National Assessments Allan Gyngell puts it: ‘How much has to do with leadership and how much is sitting around waiting for something to happen and looking at what the Americans are doing and saying, “we will have a bit of that, but not too much”?”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“Kurt Campbell, the senior official responsible for US policy in East Asia in the State Department in Obama’s first term, went further: ‘We would not be a member of the East Asia Summit today if not for Kevin Rudd.’ Rudd influenced other elements of US policy, says Campbell, including America’s so-called Asia pivot. ‘The real person on the outside who influenced US policy in Asia is Kevin Rudd. I have no reason to exaggerate. That’s a fact. He was extraordinarily effective. No bullshit.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“Finally, Peter Costello was one of the earliest advocates of a Canadian idea to create the G20 meetings of finance ministers and central bank governors. Kevin Rudd worked to upgrade the group to include leaders’ meetings. He was also important in designing the G20 intervention that arrested the collapse of the world economy in 2009, as Gordon Brown has attested. This is a good example of how the work of one Australian government can be built upon by another, years later. It happened to involve both sides of Australian politics; petty political vanities did not obstruct action in the national interest.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“A prominent Chinese general has described his country’s approach to its maritime territorial claims as a ‘cabbage strategy’.62 Major General Zhang Zhaozhong, a military theorist with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) National Defence University, said last year that China puts down one ‘cabbage leaf’ or layer of territorial assertion over another. First might be ships of the fishing administration, then maritime surveillance vessels, then the Chinese navy. Adding extra layers, such as air defence zones, is consistent with this way of patiently building a thickening protective circle and incrementally reshaping the regional strategic environment.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“A prominent Indian analyst, Brahma Chellaney of the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, described China’s frontier strategy of constant outward pressure on its borders as one of ‘salami slicing’: ‘A steady progression of small actions, none of which serves as a casus belli by itself, yet which over time lead cumulatively to a strategic transformation in China’s favour.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“The NATO treaty says that an attack on any party would automatically be regarded as an attack on all. Instead, the ANZUS treaty says only that an attack on any of the signatories would oblige the others to ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes’.56 There is no mention of the use of armed force. And the phrase ‘in accordance with its constitutional processes’ was included by the United States to give it wriggle room, says a former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“The NATO treaty says that an attack on any party would automatically be regarded as an attack on all. Instead, the ANZUS treaty says only that an attack on any of the signatories would oblige the others to ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes’.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“SBY had not asked for an apology. So by ostentatiously refusing to apologise, Abbott was setting up a straw man. Having set it up, he then demonstrated faux toughness by knocking it down. A seasoned Australian intelligence chief suggested privately that Abbott would have been much smarter to say something along these lines: ‘I was surprised to read this information in the newspapers. I will be seeking urgent briefings. I will speak to the president personally as soon as I can.’ This offers no concession and no apology but it signals concern, promises action, and takes the matter out of the public realm and into the private.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“Or, as Philip Ruddock, Howard’s immigration minister, put it to the author: ‘Indonesia will work with you if you don’t decide to embarrass them over it.’ Yet this is exactly what the Abbott opposition had done. It violated the Howard precedent and the Ruddock rule by broadcasting the tow-back plan loud and long.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“The UN Security Council is the only body empowered to authorise the international use of military force. Australia commonly sends troops abroad under UN mandates, in recent years to East Timor and Afghanistan. So why would Australia not want its voice heard at the table that shapes the mandates? Or are we only good enough to risk our troops’ lives to carry out missions designed by others? This is an intolerable idea, and Abbott’s response was a remarkable act of oppositionism. The choice was between seeing the government fail and the nation succeed. The Abbott opposition preferred to see the government fail.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“In the contest for attention between the revival of the world economy and domestic politics, there was no contest at all. The world economy lost. It was an example of the fatal weakness of the Rudd prime ministership; as he sometimes remarked to staff in his first term as prime minister: ‘We are policy rich and execution poor.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“Rudd claims to have had an ambitious five-part plan that he had wanted to take to the G20, whose members encompass 80 per cent of the world economy. The G20 had arrested the collapse of the world economy in 2009; now Rudd wanted it to restore it to health. The five points according to Rudd? Coordinate a green energy revolution, instigate a new agricultural revolution, increase efforts to raise people from poverty, boost the participation of women in the workforce, and urgently revive the long-paralysed new round of global trade liberalisation.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“Rudd was scathing on the provincial reflex: ‘It’s like so many of the debates in Australia, it’s couched as a zero-sum game – you can’t have an activist foreign policy at the same time as an activist domestic reform policy,’ he said in an interview for this paper shortly before returning to the prime ministership in 2013. Zero-sum-ism is a deep malady in Australian politics. But foreign policy becomes domestic and external becomes internal. For God’s sake, in a country with a million people overseas at any given time, we have a deep interest in engaging. The truth is that foreign policy and what we sell to the world are core national interests and anybody who pretends otherwise is engaging in a tawdry political exercise. Zero-sum-ism is not only analytically flawed – you can be active on both fronts, domestic and foreign – it also undermines Australia’s national interests.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“These are but two, telling examples of the sad priorities in Australian affairs. The leaders entrusted to protect the country’s place in the world are the same people who have to protect their own positions in power. High policy must compete for time and attention with low politics, as well as domestic policy. The big matters are commonly crowded out by the small. International policy is used for domestic point-scoring.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special