Arthur Tange, page 36
In March 1979 Killen told Parliament that budgetary stringencies required changes or delays in the acquisition programme outlined in the White Paper. While naturally disappointed, Tange was pleased that Killen’s statement indicated that priority would be given to weapons platforms and weapons systems designed to serve in Australia’s immediate neighbourhood, such as sea-going patrol boats. Killen struck a balance between the preparations for the defence of Australia’s own soil with the ability to contribute ‘to Pacific defence in accordance with the Anzus treaty’. Moreover, he noted that allies would themselves expect Australia ‘to be reasonably self-reliant and to make maximum effort to look after its own security’.499 Tange found it immensely satisfying that a conservative government had endorsed many of the principles that he had been pressing on Labor and coalition governments for years, and that had been considered controversial and dangerous when adopted by the Whitlam government. There was at last, he thought, ‘a consensus that Australia should make defence of its own territory the first duty of a self-respecting nation’.500
Despite the high regard that Fraser had for Tange, the Prime Minister was no less susceptible to the temptation that Tange had deplored in his predecessors, that of making claims and assertions for Australia’s defence interests that went beyond what Tange saw as sensible geographic and financial limits. In his March 1970 statement as Defence Minister, Fraser had said that he wanted Australia to play ‘a meaningful part’ in any significant change in South-East Asia and the Indian and Pacific oceans. Tange conceded that Fraser was only being consistent, therefore, when he declared in 1976 that it was a concern of Australia that no power would dominate either the Indian Ocean or South-East Asia. In the late 1970s there was widespread concern over the extent, and presumed ambitions, of Soviet naval activity in the Indian Ocean. A statement on this topic, designed to be reassuring but taken as complacent, was widely thought to have contributed to Gordon Freeth’s loss of his parliamentary seat in the 1969 general election. Fraser was particularly sensitive to signs of growing Soviet ambition in and around the Indian Ocean region, which would culminate after Tange’s retirement in his vehement reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. There was little that Tange could do to restrain Fraser in the late 1970s, except to reiterate his view that ‘the choke points in our archipelagic North’ were of much greater strategic significance to Australia than the Soviet bases in Africa or Southwest Asia, thousands of kilometres away from the southern continent.’501
Reorganisation and relations with the chiefs
Tange was concerned to consolidate the reforms of the Whitlam years not only in strategic policy but also in the reorganisation of the Defence Department. In the later 1970s there were fewer open criticisms from serving officers than in 1973–75. There remained nevertheless a persistent lobby of coalition backbenchers whose sympathies lay with the single services and who repeatedly sniped at the reforms that would supposedly place the uniformed members of the defence force under the rule of Tange and his fellow public servants. Some military officers felt that Admiral Smith and the other service chiefs had ‘sold out’ by accepting the reforms, instead of resigning in protest.
Killen maintained most of the major planks of the reorganisation but insisted on one significant change: the institution of a Defence Council, including all the chiefs and the departmental secretary, but chaired by himself. This could be seen as a concession to the services and their backbench supporters, all of whom wanted to see as much direct contact as possible between the Minister for Defence and the senior service officers, with minimal ‘interference’ from the public servants. But it was also a mechanism that genuinely appealed to Killen, an ex-serviceman and former Minister for the Navy who enjoyed the company of servicemen. Tange disliked the arrangement, much preferring to keep a clear distinction between ministerial bodies (Cabinet and its committees) and advisory bodies (officials, whether civilian or uniformed). He pointed out that there was no reason why the minister could not attend meetings of the Defence Committee if he wanted to hear a range of opinions on a particular topic. Fairbairn had done this on occasion in the early 1970s. But Killen insisted on creating the Defence Council, believing that it was valuable that the Minister personally hear assessments, for example, by all three services of equipment being proposed for one of them. According to Killen, Tange said after his last Defence Council meeting: ‘This [Council] was a good idea, and it was yours’. In his own recollections, Tange affirmed that it was Killen’s idea but he was rather less certain that it was good.502
The stories of robust conflict between Tange and the service chiefs continued, indeed multiplied, during these years, but had become the subject of self-perpetuating legend. The crucial relationship, that between the Secretary and the CDFS (later Chief of the Defence Force, or CDF) in the celebrated diarchy, was never as strained in Tange’s time as it became under some of his successors in the 1980s. Many in the military thought that Admiral Sir Victor Smith, the CDFS at the time of the keenest debates over the reorganisation, was too compliant and unwilling to withstand the force of Tange’s personality and intellectual drive. Civilians and military alike thought that Tange ensured the extension of Smith’s appointment for this reason. Even in retirement, Smith continued to recall his collaboration with Tange as a positive and productive time. Few accused Smith’s successor, General A.L. (later Sir Arthur) MacDonald, of easy compliance with anyone, but the two abrasive Arthurs established a productive rapport, while each stood his ground. When MacDonald retired in April 1979. he volunteered particularly warm comments and generous praise not only to Tange personally but more generally to ‘the dedicated group of public servants who make up the civil staff component of the Department of Defence.’503 Tange had these comments circulated to senior military and civilians in Defence.
Tange’s last CDFS, Admiral Sir Anthony Synnot, was probably the best qualified by experience and intellect to match the civilian. Synnot had commanded two national navies. Before becoming Australia’s Chief of Naval Staff he had held the equivalent position in Malaysia, to whose infant navy Australia provided a group of senior naval officers in the first years of the federation. Synnot’s capacity and a degree of pre-retirement relaxation by Tange were noticeable in the debates over the replacement of the aircraft carrier Melbourne, and the whole future of ship-based aviation in the Navy. Tange did not think that the expense of a new aircraft carrier could be justified but he did not kill the proposal, which continued to be debated until the early 1980s.
Reforming Defence (1): Science
During the latter half of the 1970s Tange was involved in numerous bureaucratic struggles, several of which passed into Canberra legend. Both then and later, they were often taken to be little more than turf battles, designed to protect and promote the position of Defence, and especially its civilian Secretary, in the constant interdepartmental arm-wrestling. More carefully viewed, they reflected his concern to build a Defence Department that would be as well equipped as possible to advise its minister on strategic and defence policy, and to avoid surrendering any of that capacity to other departments or agencies. Moreover, the capacity that he was building was based on the principles that underlay his approach to both organisation and policy: the need to develop distinctively Australian solutions to Australia’s defence problems, the need to coordinate civilian and military inputs into the policy process, and the need to ensure that senior military officers had the capacity to make useful contributions. The stands that Tange took would have an impact on policy-making, and thus on policy, for decades to come.
Defence science was an area to which he devoted considerable attention. The reorganisation of the Defence group brought several laboratories into the merged department, but with little attention to their direction. Tange first had to fend off the efforts of Nugget Coombs, who tried during the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (RCAGA) to bring all scientific activities in the Commonwealth government into the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). With the aid of tactical advice from Norm Attwood, a 25-year veteran of the Public Service Board then serving as secretary of the RCAGA, Tange managed to keep the defence laboratories separate.504 But that did not provide a unified direction. In addition to the inevitable tension between the attractions of pure research and the demands for research applied to defence needs, the secrecy of Defence science conflicted with the natural desire of scientists to publish their work. In visiting the laboratories, Tange found that some of the scientists sought an organisation that would give them a considerable degree of intellectual autonomy; others were happy to perform tasks directed to the immediate needs of the individual services. One of Tange’s principal aims, predictably, was to see an organisation that would serve the interests of what had formerly been ‘Defence Central’, by providing scientific advice that would support rigorous analysis of the service bids for equipment.
He was supported by Dr J.L. Farrands, the Chief Defence Scientist, but in 1977 Farrands left to become Secretary of the Department of Science. Attwood, whom Tange had by this time recruited to become head of Defence’s Personnel Division, advised him that he could appoint someone from outside the public service on a limited-term contract. Tange was surprised to hear this. Attwood thought that Tange was more deferential to the Public Service Board than was necessary and did not understand how much flexibility was available to a departmental head, even in the 1970s.505 Tange thereupon appointed Professor Tom Fink, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of New South Wales, as Chief Defence Scientist. By the end of the decade, after more official inquiries into science within the Commonwealth government, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) was created, providing the sort of cohesion and direction that Tange had long sought.
Reforming Defence (2): Intelligence
Like the RCAGA, the Royal Commission led by Justice R.M. Hope into the intelligence agencies was commissioned by the Whitlam government but reported to its successor.506 The inquiry arose from widespread concerns, strongest in but not confined to the left wing of the Labor Party, that these agencies might have acted contrary to the civil rights of Australian citizens. On the basis of his experience with ASIO over the Throssell case, Tange shared some of these concerns. Moreover, experience had not diminished his longstanding assessment that the benefits derived from ASIS operations were outweighed by the risks to foreign relations. He was much more impressed by the value of the two agencies that came under his aegis as Secretary of Defence, the Defence Signals Division (DSD) and the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO). But Tange could not understand why a judge with a strong reputation in matters of civil liberties, but with no experience in the administration of defence, diplomacy, security or intelligence, should be invited to report on virtually every aspect of the intelligence community’s structures and operations.
In late 1976 and early 1977 Justice Hope presented a series of reports that realised many of Tange’s fears. He had no difficulties in accepting Hope’s recommendations on new structures and procedures to ensure that the agencies, particularly ASIO, did not improperly infringe the civil rights of Australian citizens. He welcomed the clarification by Hope of the proper roles of ASIO and of other government agencies on such matters. But Hope’s terms of reference covered much wider ground, allowing him to propose a major restructuring of Australia’s intelligence efforts. Here, as Tange later recorded, he thought Hope’s ‘ideas … inept and his proposed structures … misguided and faulty’.507
Tange’s principal objections were threefold. First, Hope wanted to unleash ASIS from what he regarded as the unsympathetic and excessively strict oversight of Foreign Affairs. It was at this time that he referred to ASIS’s governing directive, drafted largely by Tange in 1958, as ‘a bizarre mixture of great and small constraints’.508 Tange recalled that, ‘As to intelligence-gathering from covert sources, I had long held the view that more information was being fed into the system than would be used by a power possessing interests and influence internationally as limited as Australia’s in peacetime.’ Australia, in his view, should narrow its intelligence-gathering focus to the region, matching the new direction of its strategic and defence policies. Hope, by contrast, wanted ASIS to be given greater latitude in the scope and methods of its intelligence gathering.
On this matter Tange had little success. He began a meeting of departmental heads in May 1977 by questioning the very need for a secret intelligence service, observing that he was not committed to the existence of ASIS, but his peers did not rise to the bait. The meeting generally endorsed the conclusions of a task force formed to implement Hope’s recommendations. But Tange was able to turn the meeting away from support for the idea of entrenching ASIS in legislation as he pointed out some of the difficulties inherent in the idea of legislating to protect an organisation intended to act contrary to Australia’s laws as well as those of other countries. The account of this episode by Toohey and Pinwill refers scornfully to Tange’s argument that ‘if ASIS were to be established on the basis of legislation, members of Parliament might be moved to claim that Parliament was the master of the service.’509 Tange could in fact foresee the risks to ministers and private members of Parliament, if they were too closely associated with the day-to-day operations of intelligence agencies. Thus his second concern was how to establish a chain of accountability from both intelligence-gathering and intelligence-assessing agencies to people who were in turn responsible to Parliament.
This led to Tange’s third major concern. Hope’s desire to integrate diplomatic, strategic and economic intelligence led to recommendations that Tange considered impracticable and undesirable. In particular, he took exception to Hope’s recommendation affecting Defence’s Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO). Hope saw value in centralising political, military and economic intelligence assessment within a new Office of National Assessments (ONA), within the Prime Minister’s portfolio. This would include the greater part of JIO, leaving only a small rump in Defence. Tange was furious at the thought that JIO was to be ripped out of Defence and subsumed within a new body. He dismissed as blatant tokenism the idea that one service officer could be attached to ONA to ensure that it met military needs. Tange believed that the system incorporating JIO and the National Intelligence Committee, a product of the Fairhall—Bland reforms of the late 1960s that he had further developed, admirably served the needs of both Defence and Foreign Affairs at both official and ministerial levels. Moreover, Tange believed that the economic departments would continue to rely primarily on their own sources of economic intelligence.
In December 1976, armed with Tange’s arguments, Killen look the issue to Cabinet, which in turn referred the matter to a committee of senior public servants without specifically endorsing the Hope approach. At the first meeting of this committee in January 1977, Tange described Hope’s approach as ‘deplorable’ and his methods open to ‘grave reservations’.510 He fought his case not only in this forum but in several long personal discussions with Fraser early in 1977. He hinted at the potential political difficulties for a Prime Minister if the services were expected to rely on assessments made ‘by people they had no part in appointing, had probably never heard of, and who were accountable to a different Minister’. He also pointed to the dangers of bureaucratic empire-building if ONA were established along the lines envisaged by Hope.511
This time Tange was more successful. JIO (renamed the Defence Intelligence Organisation, or DIO) was retained in Defence. ONA was established alongside, rather than in place of, JIO and other specialist agencies. Along with ASIO, it was given secure premises within the Defence complex on Russell Hill, facilitating cooperation. But for the next three decades, until the aftermath of the Iraq conflict in 2003, its numerical strength was limited. The whole experience of the Hope Royal Commission and its consequences illustrates the falsity of the portrayal of Tange, by writers critical of his alleged role in the crises of late 1975, as the doyen of the intelligence community in Australia, uncritically supporting their interests above those of the elected government.
Reforming Defence (3): The Australian Defence Force Academy
Together with defence science and intelligence, the education of officer cadets was another of Tange’s continuing preoccupations.512 As recorded in chapter 10, the idea of a tri-service academy, in which officer cadets from all three services would receive university-level education in the one institution, had been supported by Fairbairn and Fraser but effectively overruled by Gorton and his Cabinet in 1970. Thereafter the idea languished, with Tange working hard behind the scenes to ensure it did not disappear altogether. In 1974 the Whitlam government approved in principle the creation of a tri-service academy on a site in Canberra adjacent to the Royal Military College, Duntroon. On 17 April 1975 Barnard announced the appointment of a Development Council, including Tange, for the proposed Australian Defence Force Academy.
The arguments Barnard advanced at this time were consistent with themes that Tange, as well as the Martin Committee and some of Tange’s colleagues on the Development Council, had long supported and would continue to espouse. The association of young officers at the start of their careers would, it was hoped, encourage them to see themselves as part of a single defence force, rather than three rival services, and would facilitate interservice cooperation and understanding in later years. (Tange said that, during his time in New Delhi, Indian officers had often commented that their experience in the 1965 war with Pakistan bore out this contention.) The need for more officers to have a ‘broad and liberal’ tertiary education—a phrase Tange frequently endorsed—was increasingly recognised. Tange emphasised the importance not only of engineering and the physical sciences, of obvious relevance especially to the Navy and Air Force, but also of the humanities and social sciences. Tange pressed for officers to be taught, not so much what to think, but how to think, particularly how to think about broader strategic issues rather than more technical military matters. He recalled his own undergraduate days, four decades earlier, in extolling the value of philosophy as an aid to logical thought. Moreover, he believed that Australian Defence Force officers would need a strong grounding in the history and politics of the region to which the ADF was most likely to be deployed. A similar understanding of Australia’s great power allies would help officers, among other things, to assess the value to be placed in assurances of future assistance. While some elements of the military grumbled that he was trying to exclude those in uniform from positions of influence, Tange was quite explicitly seeking to prepare officers to have a greater role in the preparation of policy advice on strategic and higher defence issues. He wanted to see officers who, like the American generals who had impressed him in Vietnam, were adept at handling political and strategic concepts as well as military challenges.
