Embassy job cuts ‘hamstring our consular muscle’

Australia’s busiest overseas posts including Beijing, Port Moresby and Jakarta have been targeted for job cuts by DFAT.

Australian Institute of International Affairs president Allan Gyngell says successive governments had failed to properly resource DFAT, threatening Australian diplomacy.

Australia’s busiest overseas posts including Beijing, Port Moresby and Jakarta have been targeted for job cuts by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in a move condemned as a blow to the ­nation’s diplomatic “muscle”.

The Australian has learned two positions will be stripped from Australia’s embassy in Beijing, ­including one responsible for monitoring human rights abuses.

Another two positions will be axed from the Australian high commission in Port Moresby, while a further six jobs will go across Australia’s embassies in Jakarta, Manila, Tokyo, Mexico and Baghdad.

The job cuts, together with another 50 at DFAT headquarters in Canberra, come weeks after Scott Morrison announced $270bn would be poured into the defence budget over the next decade to deal with a “poorer, more dangerous, more disorderly” world.

Australian Institute of Inter­national Affairs president Allan Gyngell said successive governments had failed to properly resource DFAT, threatening Australian diplomacy. He said the latest wave of cuts was hitting key regional posts at the worst possible time. “What we’re losing isn’t fat but muscle from key Indo-­Pacific posts,” Professor Gyngell said.

“And in this ‘more competitive and contested word’, as the government describes it, Australia needs diplomatic as well as military muscle to help advance our interests and shape the region.”

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong blasted the targeting of key regional posts.

“Yet again we see Scott Morrison is all talk, no delivery in our ­region,” she said.

“And what message does it send when we cut engagement with China on human rights?”

Australia’s human rights partnership with China was suspended last year amid growing international concerns over the mass detention of ­Uighurs and the treatment of democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

The program aimed at “advancing human rights reform in China” was suddenly frozen after more than two decades of ­operation, as Beijing suspended human rights engagement with a number of international partners.

Human Rights Watch’s Australian director, Elaine Pearson, said dedicated diplomatic personnel were still needed in China to monitor worsening human rights abuses of activists and minorities, and track the cases of political prisoners.

“Given the human rights situation in China is worsening, not improving, this is an appalling decision,” she said.

“There are serious and widespread human rights violations taking place in China right now, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong, so the embassy should be beefing up its capacity on human rights, not abolishing this post.”

A DFAT spokeswoman said: “The withdrawal of the positions does not change the department’s commitment to delivering on the government’s foreign policy, trade and development agenda.

“Engagement on human rights issues is a core part of the fabric of all our bilateral relationships.”

Liberal MP and former diplomat Dave Sharma last month raised the alarm about Australia‘s declining diplomacy budget, saying the nation needed “a diplomatic step-up to match our military step-up”.

He blamed the funding slump on what he said was DFAT’s failure “to sell its value to the political class, to cultivate champions within cabinet or position itself with solutions to the government‘s challenges”.

Former Australian ambassador to Thailand James Wise, in an article last week for AsiaLink, said the decades of underfunding had left DFAT seriously weakened.