As seems to be the rule for budget papers, the numbers hide the pain. Despite the partial reversal on job cuts, it appears around 140-150 positions were cut in 2012-13, or more than 10% of staff from an organisation of only around 1300 people. Word is that, on top of these savings, MFAT has made major organisational changes to achieve further efficiencies, scrapping the rotational system to make Wellington postings 'new' jobs rather than place-holders between overseas postings. In the words of opposition foreign affairs spokesperson Phil Goff:

We undermined our greatest asset in foreign relations, our skilled and committed workforce, all to save a miserable $12 million which after its backdown is all the Government got from its internal restructuring.

New Zealand is a tiny nation which has been extremely successful on the world stage. Its free trade agreement with China, signed in 2008, is the only FTA China has made in the developed world. As Goff points out, New Zealand's exports to China have more than doubled since the FTA commenced, and have insured New Zealand from the worst impacts of the GFC. Goff attributes this to the expertise of New Zealand’s diplomats:

Securing the free trade agreement wasn’t by good luck. It was the skill of our negotiators and the hard work in diplomacy we put in over a long period to develop a strong relationship of trust with China. 

MFAT is a small agency tasked with the large challenge of promoting New Zealand's interests in the world. There was little fat to be cut, and now there is even less. MFAT's 2013-14 budget looks to have arrested the swing of the hatchet. It remains to be seen whether the reprieve is temporary or permanent.

Photo by Flickr user juicyrai.

The Government will achieve savings of $88.4 million over six years...from a temporary reduction in Canberra-based positions in 2013-14...

This is on top of the 100 or more positions cut last year.*

Looking at the actual numbers (which always conceal a complex array of factors like foreign exchange movements, parameter adjustments for overseas inflation and so on), the overall departmental budget will increase by $32 million to $1.698 billion, less than $1 billion of which is provided by government appropriations, and over $300 million of which was left over from the previous year's appropriations. The increase – 1.9% — is less than CPI. By comparison, Australia's development assistance budget will hit $5.6 billion this year and we will spend $25 billion on defence. 

Foreign Minister Bob Carr gets irritable every time a commentator questions him on the 'parlous state' of DFAT's budget. 'The adjective parlous should be discarded, repudiated, torn up, stamped on', he told reporters in Canberra. Having duly done as instructed, I need another word for the state of DFAT's resourcing and the level of attention given to it by government. 'Perilous' might do.

* Clarification: although staff numbers will be temporarily reduced in Canberra in 2013-14, overall staffing levels (ASL) will rise by 57 positions during the same FY.

Photo by Flickr user Halans.

My conversation with the Attorney-General in October, however, suggested that 'pleasing our friends' might indeed be one of the PNG Government's motives in hosting Australia's asylum-seekers. The Attorney-General has a great admiration for Australia as a country that 'gets things right', and told me:

The two countries are deeply bonded from the PNG perspective...knowing that we're stuck with each other...you can only understand it in times of crisis. There are very few things PNG can do for Australia...[with] Manus Island, I see that as one opportunity to help Australia — to thank it for everything it's done for us...to reciprocate for all the help we have been getting in the past.

Kua explained that opposition in PNG to the Manus Island processing centre was presented in myriad ways; as a criminal issue, as an issue of international legal obligations, and now, Namah has painted it as a breach of the nation's constitution. The Attorney-General is well-equipped to take on the Opposition in the Supreme Court, having been the lawyer for the Somare Government before the last election.

In our interview, the Attorney-General looks in some detail at the challenges for PNG's law and justice sector, the capacity and structure of the legal system, the make-up of the Supreme Court, the role of the Ombudsman and plans for an Independent Commission against Corruption.

Soso is one of only three women currently sitting in the 111-seat House. This extreme gender imbalance continues the historical male dominance in PNG's parliament; Soso is only the seventh woman elected to parliament since PNG became independent in 1975. The three female MPs (the others are Delilah Gore and new Minister for Community Services Loujaya Toni, who unseated her uncle, elder statesman Bart Philemon) represent an increase of 300% in the female representation from PNG's last parliament, in which Dame Carol Kidu was the sole female MP.

For PNG watchers: Tomorrow at the Lowy Institute, The Hon Peter O'Neill, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, will give a public address titled 'Papua New Guinea in the Asian Century'. More information on what promises to be an important speech outlining the role in regional affairs this fast-growing economy will play, click here.

The Challenge

Organisations always have multiple challenges. There is never an end point and there is never a point of perfection which, once reached, does not require adjustment. There are always moving parts, so needs and requirements are always changing. At present, in addition to the challenge outlined above in ‘the policy context’, there are four big challenges which stand out.

The first challenge concerns our own capacity as a nation to seize the opportunity of the forums to which we now belong and to develop integrated strategies in the pursuit of our national interests. Twenty years ago the two forums which Australian Heads of Government attended on a regular basis were the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (every two years) and the Pacific Islands Forum (annually). Today Australian Prime Ministers attend annually the APEC Leaders’ Meeting, the East Asia Summit and the G20 Leaders’ Meeting.

It is important to stand back and reflect on what this means. For the first time, Australian leaders now sit at the same table, a minimum of three times a year, with each of the leaders of the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Korea and Indonesia. We are at the same table a minimum of twice a year with the leader of India. For the first time Australian leaders are now involved in annual meetings with the leaders of important emerging countries such as Brazil, Turkey and South Africa, and with the leaders of the UK, France, Germany and Italy.

APEC, the EAS and the G20 each have a specific purpose but a country such as Australia should not view them as exclusive domains covering economic, strategic and financial matters. They are much more than that. The new forums which Australian leaders now attend should be seen as opportunities to further particular bilateral relations and to pursue particular multilateral objectives. They should not be pigeon-holed and be seen as separate and distinct from each other.

The second big challenge is to secure a global and regional environment in which the private sector can prosper. This means not just turning back the forces of protectionism, but also supporting Australian businesses in their efforts to trade and invest in global supply chains and tap into areas of high economic growth. This challenge is even more important as the Australian economy undergoes profound changes. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has a key role in opening markets and working with businesses as they seek to compete in an increasingly integrated global economy.

It is important in the changing global landscape to see trade agreements in both economic and broader terms, for instance with countries such as India and Indonesia.

The third big challenge is to continue to manage our near neighbourhood relations with deftness and sensitivity, consistent with our national interests. This is a challenge which confronts successive generations of Australian foreign policy advisers and decision makers. We have had mixed success. But the environment is changing. It is only a matter of time before we have a neighbour in Indonesia which has a bigger economy in nominal terms than our own. We are not used to that. As Indonesia grows wealthier and more confident it will become increasingly difficult for Australia to gain the attention of Indonesian decision makers to the extent that we think our interests might warrant. In other words, we may need to become more selective in what we push and what we ask for.

The fourth big challenge is the obvious one of resources. It is clear that the fiscal environment will remain tight for some time to come. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade will need to continue to absorb its fair share of pain. And the pain for the department will be more acute than for some other parts of government, given that we did not grow during the times of plenty in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Australia’s under representation abroad compared to other countries has been well documented in studies by the Lowy Institute and others. The challenge will reside, in large part, within the department itself. In recent years, the department has excluded training and staff development, including language training, from budget cuts. The department has also managed to grow the number of officers abroad despite the budget cut-backs. The department has done this through its own internal management processes, recognising that the value it brings to the table in government is the value derived from its global network. That network will face increasing difficulties over the next few years, especially given the fact that the cost of keeping someone abroad is so much greater than the cost of employing someone in Canberra. So the challenge for the department will be to maintain a clear sense of balance and perspective about its purpose.

Based on past performance, the department can be expected to maintain that balance and perspective.

Dennis Richardson

Secretary

This is an important national priority, there's only so much money and we are in a time of fiscal consolidation...you do have to take your place around the expenditure review committee table and engage in a bit of cut and thrust, but this, for us, over time, I think is a very important priority; we do ask our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through our posts around the world to do some amazing work for us, and that is going to grow and we need it to grow.

So, a big priority, but small evidence of a sense of urgency or budget imperative to make the dream a reality.

The second major report is that of Joint Standing Committee (Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee) on Australia's overseas representation, the culmination of 13 months' work by the sub-committee and launched yesterday, just one day after the Asian Century White Paper.

In language far less equivocal than the PM's, Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Nick Champion MP summed up the inquiry's findings: 'Australia's diplomatic network is seriously deficient and does not reflect Australia's true international standing.' 

Quoting our submissions to the inquiry and adopting our recommendations in Diplomatic Disrepair, Mr Champion called for an increase of at least 20 diplomatic posts to the network's existing 95, to build an overseas network far closer to the OECD average of 133 missions distributed across the 193 nations of the UN. To achieve this, the report cleverly recommends indexing DFAT's budget to a fixed proportion of GDP (a proportion which has been falling over the past quarter of a century), to bring Australia's diplomatic network to a level commensurate with its standing in the G20 and OECD.

Apart from this bold, and for us, long-awaited, call for increased support for Australia's principal agency for the nation's international engagement, the report makes some constructive recommendations to address the well-known problems confronting the indefatigable Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: 

• Examine and articulate Government's long-term goals for its whole of government representation overseas in a white paper which outlines the value and benefits of the overseas network, sets out the criteria for establishing new posts and national priorities for expanding the network, and raises the public profile of the work and value of Australia's diplomatic network.
• Introduce practical measures (like fees or levies) to help fund the burgeoning consular load.    
• Broaden and deepen the contacts and relationships between DFAT and Austrade and Australian business to foster better understanding and provide better assistance.
• Address the issue of effective global distribution of trade representation (by Austrade and the various State and territory trade offices around the world) by placing within COAG's remit the task of reviewing the most effective location and coordination of State and Commonwealth trade representations to best serve the national interest.
• Open a new post in East Java (as per the Asian Century White Paper recommendation). The Committee report also welcomes the newly-announced post in Senegal and reviews in detail the myriad proposals for new posts, but refrains from recommending other post openings without a rigorous assessment by DFAT and the proposed diplomacy white paper.
• Finally, in a comprehensive set of recommendations which are probably solely attributable to the formidable body of work by former Lowy Institute Research Fellow Fergus Hanson, the report recommends an Office of Ediplomacy to bring DFAT's use of new media platforms into the 21st century and the immediate refurbishment of the often clunky Australian embassy websites.

So, the White Paper is, as my colleague Rory Medcalf succinctly observed yesterday, bold on vision but short on funding, while the Joint Standing Committee Inquiry report is just plain bold.

Let's hope that, together, the two reports will finally draw attention to Australia's neglected, overstretched and underfunded diplomatic service, and elicit a long-overdue and concrete commitment to rebuilding Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade so it can serve Australia's interests properly.

Photo by Flickr user timtom.ch.

Unnwittingly entangled in a political scandal in Tripoli, but now safely extracted, Ms Bean condemned the Foreign Affairs Minister for failing her in her time of need. Her passport had been taken from her by authorities at Tripoli airport after she refused to sign a statement relating to allegations against a Libyan government deputy minister.

A day later, her family's call for urgent assistance made national headlines.

Senator Carr's exculpatory press release comprised a detailed history of Ms Bean's contacts with DFAT consular officials, beginning with her call to the Australian Embassy in Cairo before her first meeting with the investigators. He listed the phone calls and contacts with the relevant embassies, the arrival of a consul in Tripoli two days after her passport was taken and the consular escort the embassy provided for her departure from Libya four days later.

Senator Carr has pointed out that DFAT officials had extended valuable assistance to Ms Bean. She was able to leave Libya freely four days later. Yet asked on the weekend by Sky journalist Peter van Onselen, 'So how do you explain her feeling so aggrieved?', Senator Carr could only answer, 'I don't know'. He then assiduously drew fine distinctions with the case of Australian ICC lawyer Melinda Taylor, detained by militia in Zintan for 26 days in June and July this year.

As I warned after that case, and as we have frequently argued here and in our earlier work, the media 'beat up' of which Senator Carr complains is the result of a vicious cycle, fuelled by none other than himself, accompanied by a long line of foreign ministers and prime ministers who have rushed to intervene in hyped-up media cases of Australians in trouble overseas. This is one of the few aspects of foreign affairs that brings the Australian public into the orbit of Australia's foreign affairs and the interaction can be calamitous for the sane management of Australia's diplomacy.

Unfortunately for the Minister, his predecessors and his successors whoever they may be, a successful high-level intervention in one consular case leads to calls for the same intensive level of ministerial service in the next. It's not sustainable.

As some of the foreign press articles point out, there are precedents for this type of arrangement: Australia and Canada already have a formal MoU under which both nations provide consular services on each other's behalf in 21 countries, where one has a diplomatic presence and the other has none. This works well, by and large, because Canada has a strong presence in the Americas, for example, as Australia does in the Pacific, and both countries have a similar approach to the standard of consular service they provide. Under less formal arrangements, Australia provides some services to New Zealand and the UK and vice versa.

Across the Western world, ministries of foreign affairs are experiencing budget constraints or cutbacks. Several, including the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, are already members of a cooperative group on consular matters: the so-called Consular Colloque. Sharing of facilities, staff and other resources makes sense in some situations, particularly in providing routine services to citizens of like-minded English-speaking Western nations. Unsurprisingly, then, the announcement has spawned speculation on whether Australia and New Zealand, similarly stretched in their diplomatic resources, will join the party, expanding on their existing arrangements with each other and with Canada, and linking with the UK as well.

What's harder to divine is how the deal benefits the UK. It already has one of the largest networks across the globe, with 270 offices in 170 of the 193 UN nations — the third largest in the OECD, according to our latest report, compared with Canada's 140-odd (across 106 countries) and Australia's thinly-spread 95 missions (77 countries). So its global footprint is comprehensive, and one wonders what Canada, with its much smaller network, brings to the table.

In a speech just two months ago, however, Foreign Secretary William Hague proclaimed the Foreign Office's 'conscious decision to expand our diplomatic network even at a time of budgetary constraint...By 2015 we will have deployed 300 extra staff in more than 20 countries. We will have opened up to eight new consulates or trade offices'. This suggests one possible motive, that of enhancing consular services, notwithstanding a stated corporate goal of trimming that service back.

The fine print will be fascinating.

Photo by Flickr user avail.

So, far from a move to evacuate British nationals from the region, the deployment of the Response Force Task Group (RFTG) is part of a regular training cycle and longstanding plans to conduct a series of exercises with allies in the Mediterranean during October and November this year. The RFTG was established by the Strategic Defence and Security Review as a high readiness, multi-faceted maritime capability to respond to crisis events around the world.

While it is of course the case that contingency planning takes place across a range of global scenarios, there is no change to the Task Group's programme and it is not expected to deploy any earlier than originally planned.

Are you saying that you'd like the Australian Government to use our scarce taxes to pay to evacuate people who have ignored all the warnings and stayed in a country that has been in de facto civil war for months?

In response to Jonathan's last question: no. We have argued consistently on The Interpreter and in our other publications that the Australian Government must act to arrest the increasingly unrealistic expectations Australian travelers have of the consular service they can demand when they encounter trouble overseas. One journalist described it to us as the 'Why isn't The Government Saving Me' culture. In this post last year, I argued that this culture has been fanned, in part, by the opportunism of our elected representatives in a consular 'point-scoring' exercise — politicians are falling over themselves to offer ever more attention and service in cases that are sometimes of dubious merit.

My thanks to Jonathan for the pointer to the MoD statement, which should have been included in my piece. The MoD response to the Tele's story is unsurprising. I emphasised in the opening paragraph of my post that the UK's naval plans in the Eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria were an 'exercise that has evidently been planned for some time and isn't a direct response to events in Syria, but according to the UK Telegraph, the flotilla could be used to evacuate British citizens from the Middle East if needed.'

The FCO's 'do not travel' advice to Syria is as unequivocal as Australia's. Neither they nor the MoD would wish to engender high expectations among Britons in Syria that they will be rescued by their government no matter how long they tarry in Syria against official advice.

My point, however, is that there will always be a contingent (sometimes substantial) of risk-taking travelers wilfully ignoring travel advice in the expectation that their government will save them. The 500 Britons stranded in Libya in February last year are ample evidence of that, as were the Australians needing rescue from Cairo.

Whatever happens in Syria, and whatever the official travel advice from the Australian Government, there will be Australians in Syria if full-scale civil war erupts. We are not going to leave them there. Cleverly, the UK appears to have turned a 'routine exercise' into well-positioned evacuation capability. We know this is probable because the FCO has recently published its plans on crisis-preparedness. DFAT hasn't.

Before the Arab Spring, government-funded evacuations were rare. But most developed nations, and plenty of the developing ones too, sent planes to Cairo to bring back their citizens, many of those planes leaving Egypt half-empty.

The result of the UK's consular soul searching is a comprehensive 'implementation report' with detailed plans covering the development of a more crisis-ready overseas network, upgrading and streamlining of the FCO's crisis centres and systems, improved communications with its customers and clearer policies and plans on evacuations. On the latter, the Foreign Office has outlined a pretty comprehensive tightening-up of its evacuation procedures involving agreements between the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence on chartering ships and planes, service level agreements, framework agreements for chartering, and funding policies.

Now, DFAT has probably been involved in its own 'lessons learned' exercise on the political crises of 2011 and the Government's responses.  But unlike the highly transparent FCO process, it seems we will never know the result. In mid-2011, the Department answered a question from the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade about an independent but internal review DFAT had conducted of its delivery of consular services, with a 'particular focus on managing increasing expectations of consular services'. In response to a request that it be disclosed to the Committee, DFAT asserted that it was an 'internal working paper and it is the practice of successive governments not to provide such documents to the Committee' (my emphasis).

DFAT will point to the 'do not travel' advice to Syria on its Smartraveller site. Smart it is, and unequivocal. But, for the moment, Australians, like the British, readily ignore travel warnings until it's too late. Then they expect their government to rescue them regardless.

As in the UK, the Australian Government's response to the Cairo crisis and evacuations was heavily criticised in the press and in social media — unfairly, I argued at the time. But I will not argue with criticisms of DFAT's opacity, and the unfavourable comparison between it and the UK Foreign Office on its readiness to disclose its inner workings on issues of concern to the Australian public.

Syria is the next potential flash point. I challenge DFAT to provide information on its preparedness to deal with it.

Photo by Flickr user mashleymorgan.

In 2004, only 0.8% of the Department's A-based (employed from Australia by DFAT) staff spoke Arabic with working-level proficiency. By January 2012, that number had climbed to 1.3%. 3% spoke Mandarin in 2004, increasing to 3.3% in 2012. Only 2 staff spoke Farsi (Persian, spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan) in 2004; there are now 5. The proportions with fluent Korean and Thai remain largely unchanged, so there is work yet to be done.

With the 2011 Census data just released, there are interesting comparisons to be made between language proficiency levels within DFAT and those of an Australian population in the increasing embrace of Asia, as illustrated by Graeme Dobell and Danielle Rajendram recently.

According to the Census, Mandarin speakers comprise 1.6% of Australian households: DFAT's Mandarin-speaking staff is double that percentage, and when that number is re-calibrated for DFAT's policy staff (excluding corporate/administrative employees, who have limited need for language skills) the proportion doubles again. But while the number of Arabic speakers in DFAT has risen in the last few years, at 1.3% it only just matches the proportion of Arabic speakers in the general population, a surprising statistic that tempers DFAT's achievement somewhat.

Much has been said on The Interpreter about Australia's engagement with Indonesia, and Australia's neglect of Indonesian language and literacy is a common refrain. Happily for DFAT, 30% more of its employees speak Bahasa now than in 2004, but at 3.8% of total staff, the number is still very low. So it is for the general population: the Census shows that despite being our largest close neighbour, newly democratic and with a rapidly increasing GDP, Bahasa doesn't rate in Australia's top ten languages, with less than 0.5% of our population speaking it at home.

Lest this government be tempted to think that the DFAT Secretary can continue to achieve results on the meagre budget meted out each May, think again. Successive governments have done nothing for DFAT in a budget sense, and have ruthlessly squeezed efficiencies from a Department which was already completely emasculated while the rest of the public service bloomed in the last decade.

Mr Richardson has nonetheless managed to steer scarce resources into areas of the Department which have been critically run down. He has begun to address Australia's thinly-spread overseas representation — the subject of a current Joint Senate/House of Reps Standing Committee Inquiry — with new posts announced this year to serve Australia's interests and opportunities in inland China and western Africa.

Yet after two decades of 'efficiency dividends' (ie. relentless automatic budget cuts) from this relatively small department, there is little left to cut. Without significant support from government and championing of its cause by the Foreign Affairs Minister, DFAT's Secretary cannot continue to weave his magic out of nothing. DFAT's ability to meet the escalating demand for consular assistance, so vividly demonstrated in last year's deluge of crises (revolutions in the Middle East, earthquakes in Christchurch, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan) is shockingly compromised, yet a further downsizing of 100-150 staff (another 6%) is slated for this year.

Some might have expected international relations enthusiast Bob Carr to fill the role of foreign affairs champion as Hillary Clinton has so persuasively done for the State Department in the US, but they would be bitterly disappointed in this exchange at the May Estimates hearing (my emphasis):

Senator Carr:  My broad view is that the time will come when Australia will have to invest more in its foreign service if we are to grow in influence as a creative middle power. But the department cannot escape the obligation on all government agencies to deliver efficiencies in the interests of healthy budget outcomes.

Senator Fawcett: I accept that, but we have the impression that ministers fight for their departments...surely you cannot fight effectively for your department if you are not aware of how those budget cuts are going to affect the capability of your department.

Senator Carr's weasel words suggest he has bought the party line about efficiency dividends, ignoring the fact that the Department flatlined in numbers from 1997 to now while the rest of the public service grew by a monumental 61%. As we argued in Diplomatic Disrepair, the problem is that most Australian government entities have fared far better than DFAT in recent decades, and therefore have much more 'fat' to cut. DFAT has not shared equally in the gain (particularly post-9/11) but is expected now to share equally in the pain.

Australia's overseas diplomatic network remains 25th of 34 developed nations, and the smallest of all G20 nations. We cannot hope to prosecute our international interests effectively with such a cripplingly small diplomatic force. Mr Richardson has done great work in these first years of his tenure. But he needs some support, and DFAT needs a champion, to turn this around.

Like Philemon, Sir Kina completed his senior school education at an Australian private school, the Armidale School in northern New South Wales. He was PNG's High Commissioner to London in the late 90s, and Public Prosecutor before then.

He stood for the last election with former PM Sir Mekere Morauta's party, the PNG Party. Sir Mekere is not standing again, and the party is led by Deputy PM Belden Namah. Namah is a controversial leader in the PNG parliament, having attempted to arrest Supreme Court Chief Justice Sir Salamo Injia after the court upheld its 2011 ruling which reinstated Sir Michael Somare as PM. Namah is also notable for his push to delay the current elections, and has been critical of Peter O'Neill and the Australian Government for 'rushing' through the election rather than waiting to tidy up the electoral roll.

It appears, however, that despite the controversies of the last year, Sir Mekere has managed to persuade respected figures like Sir Kina and PNG University of Technology Vice Chancellor Misty Baloiloi to run with the PNG Party. With 88 candidates, it is one of the two largest parties featuring in the election (there are a phenomenal 3428 candidates in total).

Self-effacing in our interview, Sir Kina denied having exhibited any leadership potential at an early age, saying 'I was the worst of the lot...never a leader'.

He is well aware of the vast array of problems facing PNG, some of which we canvas in our PNG video research diary (see above). On return from his posting as High Commissioner to London in 2001, he told me that corruption 'was shocking to me when I returned from London and it was worse, I can feel it in the air'.

Sir Kina is a friend of Australia, having had lengthy experience working with other Commonwealth countries in London on Pacific Island issues. He stresses the importance of developing personal relations between countries. One of the driving forces in his career, he says, is not personal ambition but career satisfaction.

If he wins a seat in this parliament, his country, the region and Australia will be wishing him at least that.

Philemon has survived four PNG elections thus far. No mean feat, given the extraordinarily high turnover of MPs in PNG (around 50%). He has been Minister for Public Service twice, Minister for Transport and Civil Aviation, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Bougainville, and Minister for Finance and Treasury. In a testament to his political skills and durability, he has served as minister under Sir Julius Chan, Sir Mekere Morauta, Sir Michael Somare and Peter O'Neill.

As a young boy, Bart went to a Lutheran missionary school in Lae. He then left home at 11 years of age to attend a boarding school outside Lae, and survived for two years there by relying on his own food garden. In a characteristic understatement, Bart observed that 'this taught me to be independent'.

Encouraged by his teachers at the missionary, he earned a scholarship to St Peter's Lutheran Collage in Brisbane, where he became a prefect and captain of the First XV. It struck him that while he 'got respect as a school kid in Australia', in Australian-administered PNG he was 'discriminated against as a "black kid"'.

Of the Ministry's 860-odd New Zealand-based staff (those working for the Ministry either in New Zealand or at overseas posts, excluding locals employed at its missions abroad), 169 staff were to be cut, and approximately 600 staff were told they would need to reapply for their own jobs. Two embassies (Warsaw and Stockholm) were to be closed. Salaries and 'perks' were to be reviewed. There were to be no job guarantees after return from postings. Services, including parts of the vital consular function (the one the public actually cares about) would be outsourced.

The restructuring was originally the initiative of Foreign Minister Murray McCully, launched at a speech in April 2011. It had some supporters. But the energetic implementation by McCully and his CEO has proved too scary for Prime Minister John Key, on whom it may have dawned that this was possibly not the ideal way to run one of the world's finest foreign services. Early last month, Key reportedly intervened to 'take a hands-on role' in the restructuring, concerned to preserve NZ Inc's global dealings. A week earlier, leaked Cabinet documents indicated that Allen's slash-and-burn project had been toned down, the number of job cuts halved and the annual savings cut from $25 million to about $12 million.

After all this commotion, reading the budget papers (always a riveting task) was a bit perplexing. Where were the big cuts, the downsizing, the economising?

Looking at the chart above, the crisis seems to have passed, and 2012-13 will be quite a good year for MFAT. While 2011-12 was originally to be a high-spending year (15% over the previous year), much of the spending (capital) was delayed and now falls into the coming financial year. The Ministry's operating budget remains largely intact, although the forward estimates show the cumulative effect of the ongoing efficiency dividend ($12 million a year).

The biggest surprise for me was the monumental typo in the budget documents, which said the Ministry's appropriations are expected to 'decrease' by $15.789 million, whereas the actual appropriations documents contain an increase of that exact amount. MFAT can rest easy. There was one of those howlers in DFAT's budget last year too.

Chart: author's own, using Treasury budget documents and Statistics NZ CPI data.

Mr Danby: If I were to wave a magic wand and give you three figures - $25 million, $50 million and $75 million, could you, with that amount of money, work out a list of posts that you would open, given the priorities that you have outlined in the supplementary answers?

Mr Richardson: Yes.

You betcha. DFAT has now provided the Committee with a snappy and comprehensive list of priority missions to open:

• The first round ($25 million a year added to the DFAT budget, or a 2.8% increase): Astana (Kazakhstan), Ulaanbatar (Mongolia), Dakar (Senegal), Phuket (Thailand) and Funafuti (Tuvalu).
• The second round ($50 million a year added to the budget or a 5.7% increase): all of the above plus Algiers (Algeria), Luanda (Angola), Chongqing (inland China), Bogota (Colombia), and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania).
• The third round ($75 million a year or an 8.5% increase): all of the above plus Rabat (Morocco), Oslo (Norway) and Bern (Switzerland).

These line up with most of the recommendations in our submissions to the inquiry. In our final submission, I argued that Australia's international standing had deteriorated as a result of our inadequate diplomatic network, and that the increased whole-of-government presence at our overseas posts is as much (if not more) of a burden on Australia's diplomats as it is an advantage.

The Foreign Minister's announcements of two new posts are very welcome. We await the next 18.

Photo by Flickr user FredoAlvarez, used under a Creative Commons license.

Credit must go to DFAT Secretary Dennis Richardson, who has been blunt about DFAT's condition in successive Estimates hearings since he took over the Department in 2010. He's rebalanced an essentially static budget and begun to rebuild Australia's depleted overseas network, with over 50 new positions created abroad, four posts opened since 2010 (Addis Ababa, Lima, Mumbai and Chennai), and now two more posts announced (Chengdu and Dakar).

New measures in this year's budget are:

• Enhancing Australia's diplomacy (the new posts, as well as strengthening existing missions) — $52 million over five years.
• Sustaining diplomatic and civilian aspects of Australia's engagement in Afghanistan — $95.7 million over two years.
• Civilian security arrangements for the Baghdad Embassy — $72.2 million over two years.

While this looks like a lot, it works out at around $54 million (6.6%) extra this year once the efficiency dividends, foreign exchange movements and other offsets are factored in. This for a department which has suffered a 34% contraction in its overseas workforce since the late '80s.

Where the budget appears to have gone awry is in the consular area, always a thorny topic for governments and foreign ministries globally. The very robust increase in passport funding of 22.6% in this budget reflects the growing number passports held by a globe-trotting Australian public.

Yet this is not matched by boosting the consular budget to provide much-needed support to an overstretched consular service which assists an increasingly demanding traveling public. As a senior DFAT officer pointed out last year, there has been a 60% surge in the number of active consular cases in the past five years. Successive governments go to great lengths to prove Australia's credentials in providing unparalleled consular assistance to its citizens, yet continually fail to stump up the cash.

Then there's public diplomacy. Have we abandoned this completely? What we used to have was a fairly feeble attempt at a public diplomacy function, with some funding for cultural events and expos (which limp along) complemented by plans for some marginally more rigorous programs which were disbanded before they really started (like the ill-fated 'Australia on the world stage' program).  What we have now has dwindled to almost nothing, apart from the staple $5 million grant program, a 'Bali Peace Park' mooted for this year and a small expo in Yeosu. The rest is the Australia Network, its existence apparently now in question just months after the Government decided to award the contract to the ABC indefinitely.

The aid and defence budgets are another matter, of course, and I shall leave them to the experts. I am sorely tempted, though, to revisit this piece of frippery inspired by the 2009 White Paper.

Firstly, the Australia Network represents almost the entire government expenditure on public diplomacy, with most other platforms cut over the last few years as Australia's foreign affairs infrastructure has been whittled away. Apart from DFAT's website and the tightly-constrained activities at diplomatic posts, the Australia Network IS Australia's so-called 'soft diplomacy'. Axing it would be drastic, and would cut off one of Australia's principal means of projecting its image, strengths and values to the world.

It would also deprive the region of a valuable source of independent news and current affairs, with ABC's corps of correspondents in Asia (26 journalists in five Asian bureaux and 55 in the Asia Pacific News Centre) far outstripping that of the BBC, CNN, Sky and Al Jazeera.

Given the erratic government treatment of both Radio Australia and Australia Network over their chequered histories, it is miraculous they have any audiences at all. But they do, and they are significant: Australia Network reaches over 31 million and ranks higher than Al Jazeera English and Korea's Arirang in a major nine-city survey across Asia. It remains either the most-watched or second-most watched international broadcaster in Pacific Island markets.

In 2010, Annmaree O'Keeffe and I reviewed* the operations of ten prominent international broadcasters, including the BBC World Service, Al Jazeera, China's CCTV and China Radio International, Voice of America, Germany's Deutsche Welle and the new France 24. In stark contrast to Australia's erratic support for Radio Australia and the Australia Network over the last two decades, we found that, globally, government-funded international broadcasting had expanded rapidly, with many broadcasters launching into television for the first time. We also found a veritable mushrooming of 24-hour news services.

So while we puttered along here in Australia, the rest of the world was treating international broadcasting very seriously indeed. In 2007, the BBC World Service got a boost of £70 million over three years (on its annual budget of around £270 million) to launch TV services in Arabic and Persian. France 24 was launched with a budget of around €100 million. China is reputedly pouring over US$6 billion into its international broadcasting, and Al Jazeera has been expanding aggressively since it launched in 1996, its budgets reputedly in excess of US$300 million annually.

Against that, Australia's $23 million a year is trifling. Even on a per capita basis, Australia spends far less than any of the other services we reviewed.

Yes, there has been something of a global contraction over the last two years, with broadcasters wearing the impact of global financial crisis as public service budgets get slashed. But for Professor Sloan to say that the BBC World Service's slimming down was 'an acknowledgment of the changed context in which the service operates' is something of a non-sequitur. The BBC cuts came at a time when the entire public service budget was cut by £40 billion per annum over four years, with a two-year freeze on public service wages. And this came only after a period of intense investment and consistent government support over a century of British international broadcasting.

Does it work? Is the serious investment in all this broadcasting paying off? The BBC thinks so: in a 2010 survey on attitudes to the service in Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey (hardly easy markets), 80% of respondents said the BBC made them think more positively about the UK, far more than any other British institution they were asked to rate, such as the British Council, the UK Government, UK foreign aid, the Premier League and UK pop culture.

Properly supported, funded and structured, international broadcasting can and does work for Australia. AN's stablemate, Radio Australia, has been a mainstay in Australian communication to the region for over 70 years, so much so that Sir Julius Chan offered to return $1 million in aid to keep the service open to Papua New Guinea when the Australian Government threatened to axe it in 1996. RA's bilingual website service received millions of hits in East Timor in the lead-up to the independence referendum in 1999.

Australia is a prosperous nation whose closest neighbours face vastly different socio-economic conditions, with different religions and political systems. We are spending almost $5 billion in aid each year to help them address their challenges. Yet we have starved our diplomatic network and hobbled our public diplomacy. Now is not the time to axe our primary means of communication with our region.

* Disclosure: the review was commissioned by the ABC.

Photo by Flickr user Funky64.

During our testimony, questions from the Committee focused on issues like:

• Where should Australia open new posts (China, Africa, Indonesia and Central Asia were of particular interest), and on what criteria should DFAT base its decisions to optimise the location of its posts?
• Are our embassies over-stretched by covering too much territory?
• Is there too much bureaucratic red tape hampering the effectiveness of Australia's diplomacy?

In questioning, Philip Ruddock MP disputed Mr Richardson's claim (in his 2010 Incoming Government Brief) that DFAT had 'exhausted opportunities for reprioritisation and efficiency gains', saying 'I would have written exactly the same brief to an incoming government...regardless of what the situation was'.

This misses the point. Both we and Dennis Richardson have argued over the last few years that, while the public service as a whole has grown by over 60% since the late '90s (Defence, for example, expanding by nearly 40%), DFAT's workforce has virtually flat-lined. Its overseas staff — the diplomatic network — has shrunk by more than one-third to its current 578, while AusAID's 212 staff overseas is double what it had a mere three years ago*. 

So while parliamentarians can continue to claim that everyone needs to share the pain in these financially dark days, they should recall that Australia's diplomatic network completely missed out on the gains that the majority of the government sector enjoyed in the financial boom of the last decade.

For those who are interested in listening to Mr Richardson's testimony this evening, you can hear it live at 5.40pm this evening on Watch Parliament.

*This is a correction of the original post of 19 March 2012, which used in error a figure of 740 AusAID staff. This number included locally engaged staff and was an incorrect comparison with DFAT’s A-based staff numbers.

Photo by Flickr user Imroy.

The new media and communications continue to feature in the Lowy Institute's strengths. It placed in the top 30 globally in all three of the communications categories: the best use of the internet or social media to engage the public, the best use of the media (print/electronic), and the best external relations/public engagement programs. With the audience of this blog growing steadily, and a new, more dynamic and interactive website to be launched in late February, the Institute continues its drive to be at the leading edge of think tank communications.

This year's report highlights some of the stranger features of the policy-wonk world. Think tanks in the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, China) increased in number by over 100% between 2008 and 2011. China and India now have the second- and third-largest number of think tanks, after the US.

Australia is idiosyncratic: its strong economy, 13th largest GDP in the world and commensurately large expenditures on defence and aid suggests it could benefit from some external input into government policy, yet it has a miniscule number of think tanks (McGann puts it at 29, which tallies with our own estimates). The US, with an economy 15 times the size of ours and a population 14 times bigger, has 62 times as many think tanks. The numbers measured against the UK are similarly skewed. 

Photo by Flickr user BabyDinosaur.