By Tom Barber, AP4D Program Manager

At a cursory glance it might seem strange that it was the Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong who delivered the key message at the recent Asia Summit in Melbourne about how Australian business was “simply not keeping up” in Asia.

Wong is responsible for the first but not second half of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s work and she was delivering a speech about business not being willing to “take the opportunities we have created” through the government’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy.

But delve a bit deeper and this is consistent with the government’s sustained whole-of-government ambition vis-à-vis Australia’s international engagement that seeks to break down such silos.

Indeed, Wong emphasised this point by linking prosperity and security halfway through her speech: “Greater economic engagement … helps build alignment. It helps foster a dynamic that reassures the region of our intentions for peace and prosperity.” This wasn’t a once off – since coming to office senior figures in the Albanese government have repeatedly defined the challenge and prosecuted the case for “unprecedented coordination of statecraft” and “far more ambition across all arms of Australia’s national power”.

And it reiterated a more recent manifestation of government rhetoric: a whole-of-nation framing that includes but broadens out “whole-of-government” to involve a range of other sectors including business and investment, science and technology, education, sports, culture, media, civil society and more. This manifestation acknowledges that global engagement is not just the domain of core international policy actors but is the role of a far wider constituency.

In February the foreign minister warned that “the most complex strategic circumstances since the end of WWII” meant that “business as usual isn’t enough to ensure and to assure our interests”. She identified “the siloed nature of government; the coordination challenges of our federal system; the lack of systems to support collaboration; and managing competing interests” as impediments to fully realising Australia’s international objectives. “The genuine whole-of-nation effort”, she said, “requires an unprecedented level of both investment, but also coordination to give full effect”.

So how is this whole-of-nation ambition tracking?

On the positive side of the ledger, there appears to be widespread buy-in from across the array of non-government sectors that contribute to Australia’s international engagement (even when admonishing government). This was illustrated during extensive whole-of-nation consultations last year by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue, the results of which were launched by Wong and Shadow Foreign Minister Birmingham at Parliament House.

The idea is now being taken up more broadly, as demonstrated by a new flagship conference from the ANU National Security College as well as the aforementioned Asia Summit partnership between Asia Society Australia and The Australian Financial Review. A recent Business Council of Australia report likewise noted “a need to better integrate economic and national security decision-making to ensure we can respond to changes in the geo-strategic environment”.

But barriers to realising a genuinely whole-of-nation approach remain. For one, it is constrained by the same structural idiosyncrasies that impede whole-of-government approaches, particularly the siloed nature of the federal bureaucracy. This also poses challenges to coordination and strategic coherence. Collaboration between government departments and agencies can be hard enough; bringing non-government sectors and actors into the fold adds to the complexity. And there is the task of ensuring a whole-of-nation approach isn’t perceived as an attempt to enforce top-down directives from government.

Another key limitation is resourcing. The last two federal budgets have taken incremental steps towards rebalancing a long-skewed development, diplomacy and defence allotment. But without a sustained and substantive allocation of funding there is a risk that the “all tools of statecraft” and “whole-of-nation” rhetoric will remain just that. Coordination is not something for governments to latch onto as a substitute for doing things more directly. It requires additional resources rather than less.

By listing a raft of achievements encompassing areas like defence, policing, infrastructure, climate action, civil society and education, the foreign minister’s Asia Summit speech showed that the government judges Australia’s Asia engagement in whole-of-nation terms. 

In that sense, “we’re simply not keeping up” was a rallying call from the foreign minister to a key whole-of-nation sector – the business community – best understood alongside those the government has made to the sporting, scientific, diaspora, and other communities.

The note of frustration at the lack of business engagement suggests its ambition has not yet been fulfilled.

That said, realising a genuine whole-of-nation effort was never realistic in one term of government. It takes time to address systemic challenges, negotiate difficult trade-offs and engender cultural change. Moreover, there is no whole-of-nation end point at which mission accomplished can be declared; like governing writ large, it is unending and often incessant. A whole-of-nation approach is not an easy aspiration, but in a difficult world there may be no choice.

Encouragingly, there appears to be bipartisanship support, with Birmingham committed to “building upon this work in the years ahead”. In that respect, a whole-of-nation approach could indeed be a key legacy of the current government, insofar as it laid the foundation.

Tom Barber is Program Manager at Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue.

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