15 - A national asset

Summary

In 1986 when I was Defence Minister, I wrote to the Australian National University and said, “To appoint Dr. Ball to this position as a Special Professor at the Australian National University would do the nation a substantial service.” At that point of time, Des Ball's research output would have constituted a lifetime's work for most academicians. My recommendation was not about volume. Nor was it about quality, substantial though that was. I wrote because the work that Des did from the academy was a critical part of the foundation of core elements of Australian national security policy. To see him leave Canberra for Harvard or elsewhere would have diminished our capacity to ground and round out some important directions in planning for the defence of Australia.

At that point, when Des, then head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) at the Australian National University (ANU), was appointed to a personal chair, the government was about to launch a seminal white paper on the defence of Australia, and about to complete a substantial renegotiation of the agreements controlling the major joint facilities Australia hosted for the United States. The new agreements were to see a major incorporation of Australians in the workforce of the facilities and a cementing of the government's purpose to secure “full knowledge and consent” with regard to their operations.

Much of the change reflected the product of an intellectual interaction between the political leadership of the then government and the academy of almost two decades’ standing and during a period of considerable fluidity in Australian strategic thinking. Des Ball was not alone in this creative interchange. One thinks of figures such as Robert O'Neill, Hedley Bull, Coral Bell, J. D. B. Miller, T. B. Millar, Geoffrey Jukes, Paul Dibb (when out of government), Ross Babbage, Jim Richardson and a few others. However it was only about a cricket team's worth and in that context Des as often as not opened the batting.

Across the globe, in the nations of the Western Alliance, the academy played a significant role in framing the debate not simply about national security but civilisation's survival. The development of nuclear weapons changed the whole character of defence debate, dragging it out of the bowels of the bureaucracy into the broader political environment.