Top government official offers clear view of how Tony Abbott sees the world
June 30, 2015
John Garnaut
Asia Pacific editor for Fairfax Media
Michael Thawley's seven minutes of analysis, delivered from hand-written notes at a high-level Canberra forum, reflect his considered personal views.
But they also amount to the clearest exposition of how Tony Abbott sees the world that has ever been delivered.
Thawley was the key foreign policy adviser to John Howard and is a mentor to Abbott's national security adviser, Andrew Shearer.
These men don't speak for each other but they share a common perspective.
Thawley said in his speech it would be "crazy to bet against China" given its extraordinary and unbroken 35-year economic performance.
But he also pointed to the astonishingly difficult economic transition that China has to make from being an investment-dependent economy, where cadres man the gates of capital, to one that is mediated by market institutions and driven by hundreds of millions of autonomous consumers.
"This is a truly huge challenge and if China does succeed it won't be the same place afterwards," said Thawley.
"It won't be a democracy, maybe, but it won't have the same institutions that it does now. It will be a very different country."
In Thawley's view, the siloed, stratified, secretive and security-centric nature of Communist Party power is as limiting as it can be formidable.
These structures will either constrain China's continuing economic rise, or they will radically change, and the current structures are unsuited to China assuming a role of genuine global leadership.
There is room to question Thawley's analysis of how Chinese leaders will respond to the competing demands of dictatorship and growth.
But before he is lambasted for indulging conservative ideology, or even neo-conservative ideology, his critics should look more closely at the growing gap between the economic reforms that China's leaders said would deliver and what they have achieved.
They should look back at how US President Barack Obama tried to make room for China on the global stage, but was treated with contempt.
And critics should look more closely at the history of the overlapping network of security arrangements that now connect Australia, the US and almost every major country in the region.
These networks have been constructed by Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Abbott, with remarkable continuity, because none of these prime ministers have believed that Chinese "primacy" is either inevitable or desirable.
It's just that nobody has tried to spell out a rationale before.
Whether or not you agree with Thawley's views on China it's a good thing that somebody in Canberra has finally had the courage to express them.