It was 10 years to the day after he joined the army that Captain Clinton Fernandes’ Sydney home was raided.
“The night before was a wonderful night, it was the opening ceremony of the [Sydney] Olympics and you really felt proud of everything — the Indigenous history, the stockmen, the little girl who was singing ... and I had a bit of whisky.
“The next morning about 6.45, I was woken up in bed by somebody shaking my shoulder. I look up, and it’s the federal police ... well-dressed, ties and so on ... one guy had a camera videotaping everything and another guy had a 9mm Glock [pistol] pointing.”
‘You always wonder how are you going to hold up under fire’: Professor Clinton Fernandes.Credit: Jason South
The AFP’s raid was part of an investigation into leaks of top-secret intelligence reports detailing what Australian government officials knew about Indonesian forces’ actions in East Timor leading up to the 1999 independence vote. After seven hours of questioning, the police left the house, having found nothing.
When I ask Fernandes how he felt being raided by officers of the state he had sworn to serve, he looks at the ground for a moment and then back at me before repeating a word.
“Proud. You always wonder how are you going to hold up under fire ... I felt I conducted myself the way an Australian Army officer would do ... with bravery, calmness and alertness.”
After a year’s suspension on full pay, Fernandes was cleared to return to the army and promoted to the rank of major, but by then he was bound for academic life, and today he is a professor of international and political studies at the University of New South Wales, where some of his students are Australian Defence Force cadets.
Sub-Imperial Power by Clinton Fernandes.
Sitting opposite him at Liminal, a cafe in Melbourne’s Collins Street, there are a few tell-tale signs of his old life. There is the soldier’s disdain for lavish fare — he orders a straightforward mushroom toastie — and the sturdy hiking boots (“it has to be boots — I don’t feel comfortable in other kinds of shoe”). But most of all, there is the methodical laying out of each line of thought, an approach that serves him well in his new book, a succinct but bold re-examination of our foreign policy entitled Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena.
The book takes aim at the standard portrayal of Australia as a “middle power” dedicated to upholding a “rules-based international order”. Fernandes argues that you can’t explain the nation’s foreign or domestic policy using this rubric, marshalling historical and current events to show that Australia is a “sub-imperial power” dedicated to upholding the dominance of the United States.
The analysis his argument relies on is what the military paid him for as an intelligence officer, working seven storeys underground at Sydney’s Garden Island. His assessments weren’t always what his superiors — or, indeed, their counterparts in Washington — wanted to hear.
A mushroom toastie at Liminal in Collins Street.Credit: Jason South
“I would sometimes work for 48 hours straight, I wouldn’t go home. I had a change of clothes upstairs, and I would shower, shave and put on a new uniform and come back ... I really loved the idea of reading all the materials and writing my reports.
“On May 21, 1998, [Indonesian leader] Suharto resigned, and I was the only person inside the intelligence system who predicted that he was going to resign weeks before he did and why he would do so. I was ordered by the intelligence boss to de-publish that assessment and withdraw it from the system ... I was also the first and only person to predict the Indian nuclear tests [that year] ... that was controversial, too.”
Fernandes says he was required to take back these accurate forecasts because they were at odds with Australia’s sub-imperial role, which has benefited the nation greatly in some ways but kept it back in others. In the book, he points to our “wealthy but dependent economy”, too heavily reliant on export of a limited number of mineral resources; a stock exchange in which the dominant private investors are US-based and under no obligation to benefit Australia in their actions; and the way in which our parliament is excluded from information and national security decisions, ranging from going to war and renewing support for the Pine Gap surveillance base to the recent AUKUS deal.
The result is that Australians are too often prevented from tackling hard truths about the nation’s actions abroad, from Chile in the 1970s to China today.
Pointing at my rapidly disappearing plate of rotisserie Hazeldene chicken, he continues: “Information is about variety and unpredictability ... if the kitchen here only served the same dish every time, then the menu would carry no information; it would be perfectly predictable.
Liminal’s rotisserie Hazeldene chicken.Credit: Jason South
“When you say ‘security’, or ‘we are defending ourselves’, every state says that. It carries no information. We are defending ourselves in Afghanistan, we are defending ourselves in Iraq, we are defending ourselves in the Taiwan Strait. And the biggest lie at the moment is that we are doing ‘freedom of navigation operations’ in the South China Sea.
“We are not doing freedom of navigation operations, we are dropping sonar buoys in order to identify the acoustic signature of Chinese submarines, in order to attack them with the United States. We’re not Dora the Explorer or Matthew Flinders.”
US, Australian and allied naval vessels take part in Exercise Pacific Vanguard in August.Credit: Royal Australian Navy
In his book, he reminds readers of a much-shared scene in the ABC’s comedy, Utopia, where Rob Sitch’s character highlights the absurdity of spending hundreds of billions of dollars protecting our trade routes from China, our No.1 trading partner.
That may be funny, he says, but it misses the point: “That is not the aim of the policy. In the real world, the military build-up is about whether foreign military and intelligence activities can be conducted inside another country’s exclusive economic zone [an area off its coast where a country has special rights regarding exploration and resources].”
Fernandes rejects the idea that the public needs special expertise to debate such issues, recalling that he was one of just four cadets selected to join army intelligence in his intake: “[In the end], there were about 15 cadets on the intelligence corps course and that’s because everyone who failed pilot’s course, and armoured corps course, or were colour-blind and couldn’t drive a tank were told ‘well, you can go to intelligence’. That showed me that the mystique of intelligence and security clearances is not true.”
Instead, we need better access to information — “US-style declassification of government records, US-style oversight of intelligence agencies”, as he puts it in the book — but also a change in attitude from “strategic narcissism” to “strategic empathy”.
Take Taiwan, whose right to self-determination he supports: “We know how we would feel if China set up a military base in the Solomon Islands, and the Solomon Islands are about 2000 nautical miles away from us ... strategic empathy is to see things rationally [as if] we were in Beijing’s place, with what Douglas MacArthur called ‘an unsinkable aircraft carrier’ 180 nautical miles away from us.
“The United States is not helping Taiwan. It is using Taiwan ... We plan in Australia for other country’s capabilities, not their intentions. But we say, ‘you should plan for our intentions, which are always benign, not our capabilities’.”
Should Australia purchase B-21 bombers or push ahead with the AUKUS deal? (“We are not buying submarines,” Fernandes insists when I raise this. “We are subsidising the US Navy’s submarine budget.”) Do we want about 50,000 US troops to be based in northern Australia by the end of the decade, as he predicts will happen? He believes Australians and their representatives must have more say in these questions.
The bill from Liminal.Credit:
In his book, Fernandes takes the somewhat unusual step of thanking his two lawyers. For some years, he has fought in court to bring secret papers about Australia’s conduct towards Indonesia and East Timor into the public domain. One of his friends, historian Craig Stockings, has also worked to bring these facts to light, and I ask Fernandes about the recent publication of Stockings’ official history of Australia’s peacekeeping effort in East Timor, which he has read.
“What [Stockings] was able to do in the book is go through the deep roots of the policy ... showing that [the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade] protected Indonesia when they committed genocide in the ’70s, and in the 1980s and ’90s ... and that the policy’s real objective was to keep Timor inside Indonesia.
“Where I think there is room for disagreement,” Fernandes adds, “is when [Stockings] is trying to evaluate the effect of public pressure [on John Howard’s abrupt 1999 decision to abandon that policy].
“His main source is an interview with [former deputy prime minister] Tim Fischer who claimed there was no suggestion that civic activism forced the government’s hand.”
Fernandes rejects that view and believes passionately that Australians within and outside the corridors of power must be active in questioning and seeking to alter government policy. While we are talking about his days as a soldier, albeit in peacetime, I put it to him that he was an upholder of the nation’s code.
The professor interrupts me: “I still am, actually.”
Sub-Imperial Power by Clinton Fernandes is published by Melbourne University Press, $24.99.