Instead of trashing Simon Crean’s legacy, Labor should fix its war powers mess

The Albanese government has the perfect opportunity to honour Simon Crean’s memory and legacy on war powers, but seems content to preserve a system that enabled John Howard to take Australia into the Iraq disaster based on a lie.

Crean supported fundamental reform of Australia’s antiquated executive-based war powers — a relic of the era of absolute monarchies — writing in 2018: “Today more than ever, in a period when there is much less trust in government and our political institutions, we need to reflect on how such a momentous decision should be made in the future. I am a great believer in the wisdom of counsel and in ensuring as best we can a level of bipartisanship for such a decision. It can’t be just a prime minister’s call. We need to find a better way to ensure it is a process and decision of the Parliament.”

Labor committed to review war powers at the 2022 election, but the result of a government-controlled inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade was — the dissenting report by the Greens aside — an endorsement of the status quo with some minor modifications. As Crikey pointed out at the time, it ignored the bulk of submissions.

So far, the Albanese government hasn’t even agreed to the minor adjustments to cabinet handbooks and parliamentary resolutions recommended by the committee in March. Yesterday, in response to a question about support for Crean’s 2018 position, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrongly claimed the question was conflating Crean’s opposition to the Iraq venture with the war powers issue: “Cabinets are the appropriate place, governments, to make decisions with regard to Australia’s involvement in military conflict.”

But there are no substantial arguments for the executive to hold war powers over Parliament. A shift to a requirement for parliamentary approval raises no objections that aren’t easily overcome, as Professor George Williams showed in his submission to the committee.

Claims that parliamentary debate on decisions to commit Australian forces would lead to exposure of classified information — an always overblown claim used by Australian security bureaucrats to hide from parliamentary scrutiny and public accountability to a degree that their US counterparts, wholly subject to congressional scrutiny, must marvel at — are trivially easy to address by ensuring classified information is not debated in open Parliament.

Governments also like to claim that parliamentary approval would inhibit Australia’s ability to respond quickly in an emergency. It’s hard to conjure up an extreme case where a lightning attack requiring instant response would be cruelled by needing to recall Parliament — the history of most recent conflicts is that our involvement has been preceded by months of media coverage and public debate, with Iraq being the clear example. Even so, provisions could be built into the legislated requirement for enabling retrospective consideration of decisions made in an emergency.

And arguments that the modern battlefield extends into the cyber realm, thus complicating the requirement for parliamentary approval, are little more than efforts to obscure the issue with definitions — as Williams notes, if something requires an exercise of war powers under the constitution, it should be subject to parliamentary approval.

Despite the lack of any weight to these objections, Labor — like any opposition coming into government — has decided it quite likes the lack of accountability and wide sweep of executive powers to which it objected in opposition.

And there’s no evidence that the structure that enabled Howard to embark us on a disastrous war based on a lie have changed. It’s easy to envisage a prime minister following a US president into a conflict with China intended not to neutralise a real threat but for US domestic political purposes.

It might not be a perfect repeat of Iraq — for instance, now it’s Nine newspapers that incessantly warn of the China threat and suggest anyone who disagrees is an appeaser, rather than the Murdoch camp. And next time it might be Labor, not the Coalition, tub-thumping for war.

Which would you rather: Parliament deciding to commit Australia to war, or a PM of either party? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.