“Diplomacy, first and foremost, is about influence”: former Australian diplomat Jane Hardy steps through her journey in foreign affairs

PHOTO: Jane Hardy

In an exclusive interview with Pivot, former Australian diplomat Jane Hardy goes through her three-decade long career within diplomacy and the Australia Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Having been involved in high-level discussions around areas such as arms control, trade and the US-Australia relationship, Jane gives an insider view into how the culture of Australian diplomacy operates.

Jane Hardy is a former Australian diplomat and has worked in foreign policy for over three decades. Her postings include being the Australian Consul-General in Hawaii, being Australia’s ambassador to Spain and working in Australian diplomatic missions in Malaysia, South Korea and the USA. She has regularly given comments for national and international media and think-tanks, including the ABC, Lowy Institute, POLITICO and the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

Rahul: Talk us through your journey with the Australian government since you joined DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) as a graduate officer in 1991.

I was already a little bit older, having done a few degrees by then. I’d also worked for Oxfam, but I went into DFAT, in 1991, into a graduate program, which by that stage had evolved into a two-year very professional program — including degrees offered by Monash University interestingly, and I did my Masters at that time. 

It was a two-year graduate program, so most people would rotate between three desks within two years — typically something to do with trade, something to do with traditional bilateral relations, and something to do with multilateral relations. I actually stayed on the US desk for two whole years. One of the reasons was my degree from Flinders University had previously been economics, and I worked on the Australian government’s response to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). So, we did in-depth analysis. There are thousands of pages to these agreements, as you can imagine, and we worked out how it benefited or crossed across Australia’s interests, and we had a good relationship with the Clinton administration. He came in at that time, and it was the first time I worked on a presidential transition.

So that was my first two years in DFAT, and that was thrilling. 

I learned the rest — I’d obviously been working on both trade and political matters in the US section — but I learned a lot more about those things eventually when I went on my first posting to Kuala Lumpur in 1993–96 and that was the evolution of a lot of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) forums, particularly the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC). APEC is still going. It’s really a great forum. It’s huge. I think we often lose sight of how important these things are, so I’m very pleased to be answering your questions, because it’s a way of explaining to people how things work and what’s of importance. And the ASEAN forums, and particularly APEC, have evolved into a really important 21-member grouping, which spans the Asia-Pacific, including the US, China, Japan, right across through Southeast Asia, ASEAN at its core, and various other members as well, who participate or observe. 

So that was brilliant. I had a couple of years on the US desk, working on a big free trade agreement. We weren’t involved, but we needed to understand how it impacted on us. And then working in Malaysia on the ASEAN forums, particularly the economic forums, and they became very important in our diplomacy. After that, I had several postings, but several other postings and positions in Canberra. 

I’ve had fabulous postings, and quite often they’re not places I would have chosen. In fact, we don’t always choose them, they choose us. Seoul was one example. I came back from Malaysia and the ASEAN Regional Forum was developing. I worked in an area of DFAT called the International Security Division, and I just loved it. That bit of the work was about the evolving ASEAN security architecture, part of which was the ASEAN Regional Forum. That then led to more of an interest in security matters, and I’ve done a lot of work on arms control over the years, especially coming back to Canberra between my postings. Anyway, I was sitting there, and I had started applying for postings again. and someone rang me from staffing and he said, Jane, ‘Are you interested, or would you be considered for a posting in Seoul?’ And by this stage I had been promoted and I was director level, and it was the director political in Seoul, and I said, ‘Oh, let me ring my family.’

I rang. No one answered. I then rang another friend who had been in Seoul, and I said, ‘What are the schools like?’. She said, ‘fabulous’. So I rang my friend Tony back in staffing, and said, ‘Yes, I’ll be considered’. So, three months later, I was on my way to Seoul.

That was a fabulous posting, really one of my favorites. Back in those days, that was 2000–2003, it was a very different place than it is now. It’s much more internationalised now, but there was absolutely no English spoken. Although I was lucky that the foreign ministry officials, with whom I mainly interacted on North Korea and other security matters — they were very good in English. My colleagues in the trade section, they really had to use their Korean and use local staff to help them do the trade negotiations with Korea. That can be a tough road. I had the easy road — North Korea — it was great.

I’ve had fabulous postings, and quite often they’re not places I would have chosen. In fact, we don’t always choose them, they choose us.

PHOTO: Jane Hardy

I went up [to North Korea] a few times, including the first time in 2001 when we had a rapprochement with North Korea, and David Irvine was the ambassador in Beijing. Our ambassador to China was cross-accredited then to Pyongyang, North Korea, to reestablish diplomatic relations, so I went up a few times at that time. That first time was really amazing, and I often recount tales from those discussions. The time goes so slowly in places like Pyongyang, but we were very well looked after. We were bringing gifts. We had aid in the works. We had already provided humanitarian aid prior to reestablishing diplomatic relations, and then we were doing other things, so we had North Korean officials as students at the Australian National University (ANU) studying economics and trade, we had several others studying architecture and various things like that. A wide range of small bilateral projects — as well as we continued our multilateral provision of mainly food aid and also assistance for energy under the American-led Korean Peninsula Energy Development Corporation (KEDO). That was building light water reactors for North Korean energy provision. That was also fascinating.

It was all very controlled. We couldn’t see a great deal. Though, we did always insist every time we went up that we saw some aid projects, and we saw some local projects — whatever they wanted to show us. I saw the beginnings of their cyber operation, which is infamous now in a bad way. And we met with the foreign minister, who was a great guy. He knew Seoul quite well. He was elderly, and he’d worked on the 1990s brief window of rapprochement between North and South. He’d worked on that. He was now working again on Sunshine Policy under Kim Dae Jung, North and South, and it was during those periods where we could actually do some things with North Korea. I was lucky because the door closes again very quickly if there is a real problem that develops, particularly a problem between North and South — then our access closes off. So I was lucky to be doing it through those years, and subsequently from Canberra, I went back [to Korea].

The secretary actually intervened and put me on the Korean desk as director of the Koreas area. In those days, we’ve had the Korea-Australia Foundation, as well as a big section working on both North Korea and South Korea, and we also had the Korean Embassy open in Canberra, so I had to deal with on a daily basis the diplomacy in Canberra — both North and South — and that was a bit tricky. We had the Pong Su drug ship situation —  it’s a very long and sad tale, and it was Australia’s biggest heroin haul. In Victoria — actually in Lorne — was linked to an illegal North Korean ship, which came around the southwestern corner of Australia from Cambodia at Easter time, and there was a very long, drawn-out case there that the crew were put in detention. They were great. I used to call the governor at the Barwon Jail and inquire about their welfare. He said, “Oh, they’re wonderful people, the crew of the ship. They do all the gardening. They eat all the food. They seem to be very nice people”.  I felt so sad, though, because, of course, they were people who had no agency of their own, and they were just doing what they were told, but it pointed to the work we did subsequently on illicit activities, as well as nuclear activities with North Korea, and after that time I worked almost exclusively on arms control and other security issues in my career because it is such a wonderful, fascinating area. So sadly, I haven’t used my economics degree very much.

I came back, and I then worked on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a director. I then got promoted, and I was our envoy for arms control in a senior executive position. I did that several times, coming to and from postings, including after I came back from Washington. I then became branch head for the US relationship — worked on three years of Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’, that period when he visited Australia, and then went off to work in Europe. The European part of my career was much later, but it was all still highly relevant because we have close relationships with the Armada shipbuilder in Navantia in Spain. That was one of the key issues there, so it was all still very strategic. 

Later on, we worked towards a free-trade agreement (FTA) with the EU. I didn’t work directly on that by that time, but we all become involved in a whole lot of cross-cutting issues, particularly the higher up the hierarchy you go; it is a fairly small world interestingly. Over the years. for example, my posting in Malaysia, I was a rank called second secretary, and we had a second secretary’s lunch group, and my fellow diplomats were just fantastic. They were the Asia-Pacific diplomats; Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Korea. I went to Seoul on my second posting, and I was promoted, my colleagues had been promoted — we’re all working with each other in Seoul: the two Korean officials who I’d met in Kuala Lumpur. And so on it goes, one of them ended up as the arms control ambassador, and further on in my career, I worked with him again! It’s an amazing world, that personal interconnection.

Rahul: That’s a lot of experiences you’ve had. So obviously you’ve had all these experiences, ideologically since when you first started in the early 90s, what values lie at the heart of Australia’s foreign policy identity and approach?

It’s a really important question, because people have stereotypes of diplomacy, mainly taken from very bad TV shows. Our brand of foreign policy, very distinctly, is two things: it’s our values, although working in Malaysia and other countries, you don’t tend to talk about them in those terms, but they still underpin our values, which entail democracy and transparency and rule of law. But secondly, and very obviously, pragmatism. What can we get done? One of the things I learned, having done a couple of degrees broadly related to international relations, is that you can have some really good theories, and they’re important.

The two that have always influenced me, one was the Theory of Containment, written as a diplomatic telegram by George Kennan, the American, and it’s still one of the most fabulous documents to read. The ‘Long Telegram’, it’s called. The Theory of Containment was preceding the Cold War, was prescient and guided most of us through the next 20–30 years of dealing with the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. 

The second one was Joseph Nye’s theory of soft power, and I studied this at the time that I was at Monash. I loved those theories of soft power, which are very broad. They’re not airy-fairy. They’re actually about not just media and communications, not just what we call public diplomacy — which is when you put on an art exhibition or the ambassador goes to give a speech at a university — that’s all part of it, but soft power is far more fundamental than that, and the Americans, of course, have tremendous soft power. One of the questions now is whether they still have the soft power needed to underpin their major power status. The Chinese didn’t have it. They may have had ancient soft power, but it seemed to be dissipated, and they were certainly diminished. Then had a wolf-warrior system for a while there which we suffered from. But now they’re softening very much so and in their public persona they’re trying to project this benign benefactor role which the Americans actually had the monopoly on after the Second World War.

I always say the Koreans are one of the world’s best soft power countries. [South] Korea was a very impoverished country, now very well off; incredibly hard working, has a bad political history, which most Westerners remember and think about when they think about Koreans. They have a difficult language that no one else seems to speak, except the North Koreans, and yet they have one of the world’s most profound soft power effects through their embrace of good quality social media,  AI, and so on. Korea is an interesting test case in how a society has absolutely grabbed hold of AI and made it work for them, so soft power was important. 

Now our kind of diplomacy had elements of that, and still today, regardless of what you read in some newspapers, Australia’s image abroad is fantastic. I’m almost embarrassed by it at times when I go abroad. It is still very positive, and it’s not just the beaches and the lifestyle. Though, lifestyle, we are considered a lifestyle superpower still, even with all the problems that we have [with] housing and employment, and the difficulties that society is going through with transition to the digital economy. 

Underpinning that, though, is a form of diplomacy where we are very trained in identifying costs and opportunities. It’s a very straightforward approach, like I did on NAFTA. At that time, the world’s largest [agreement], apart from the EU, it may have been larger than the EU at that time in terms of traded goods, the dollar amounts, and so on.

We go through these things in detail. We go through them with specific questions in mind. We workshop them carefully with each other. We bring our own internal experts around a table. We also invite external experts from time to time, and Ross Garnaut was one of those. He came in from the ANU, a fabulous economist, very knowledgeable about the Asia-Pacific and he was a great help. So we identify things that were niche areas for us. The embassy in Washington was our other partner so together we work on these things. 

Still today, regardless of what you read in some newspapers, Australia’s image abroad is fantastic.

Now highly pragmatic. What we then do is use all of that experience, we continue to consult — outside, inside, across government — and eventually we got our own FTA with the US, and we have other very positive FTAs with other major trading partners. So that’s how it’s done, and it’s a very long game. There is nothing that is done accidentally. There is nothing that is done that is short term. Same with the aid program. Apart from humanitarian disaster response, which is a very big part, the bits you don’t see are those very long-term programs, which have been worked out with partner countries down to the community level for many years, sometimes decades. 

We are able to then often be in a position to know the local environment and recalibrate from time to time. The last budget was an example of this actually. I was asked by a journalist about the budget cutting some of the multilateral programs, and if you look at the list of programs that were cut in the last Australian government budget, they were programs which were in decline by natural means — a positive thing in some cases. One was the Global AIDS Fund, a health fund. Another one was Pandemic Response Fund, but that fund, I think, will morph. It’s not to say we won’t continue to be involved in health funds in the future. 

It’s just not those particular ones, and the other one that was cut was the UN Development Program (UNDP). Now, development is a broad term that encompasses what people think of as community aid, and it is a very broad term. We chose to redirect funds that we were putting into that directly into our own bilateral programs in our immediate region: South East Asia [and the] Pacific. And it’s just a cost-benefit analysis which will drive this. We believe we know more about our region than most, and we have our very close bilateral partnerships in place already over many decades , so it’s just a cost-benefit analysis. There were cuts there, but then overall a big increase in the dollar amounts for the aid budget.

You inevitably get asked about the cuts. Sometimes the cuts are a good thing. There will always be a winner and a loser, but the cuts are good in the sense that quite often they demonstrate that in fact something has reached maturity, and we don’t believe it needs our input anymore in that particular form. So that can be good.

PHOTO: Hardy with US military commanders in Hawaii in 2022, supplied by Jane Hardy

So I’d say it’s the combination of our interests and values — the classic things: hard nosed interest. What is it about the North American market that we can benefit from, engage, forge our way into a sector. Same with arms control. What can we do combined with our values [of] democracy. Although, we don’t tend to push that line, even though in our immediate region, because it’s like we’re preaching, and we don’t want to come across that way. By the way, most of our region has democracies with high integrity, so the days of nation building are kind of in a different phase now. We don’t do that sort of values-preaching, but those values still underpin what we do, particularly rule of law and transparent processes, which can be contested.

Jeremy: I’d like us to delve deeper into how changing values affect relations practically on a bilateral level, especially with the United States. What has your experience been like in your positions in the United States in the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s, and how have you seen the Australia-US bilateral relationship evolve on the ground?

During my four and a half years in Washington, I worked in Congress for quite a few months for both parties [and] different members of Congress. I did that in order to take up my job as head of the congressional office in our embassy, and then for the next four years, did a number of things lobbying on specific programs. We got, for example, a forerunner to the AUKUS arrangements, which was to get an exemption for Australian procurement of US-sensitive military goods. I got a little award from Defense for that. I love my Defense colleagues. We’ve always worked so well together. That was a matter of lobbying Congress and doing certain things. We actually got a treaty through the US Senate on that, which is a very difficult thing to do. Very few treaties actually pass the US Senate. 

Secondly, I did the domestic politics, so apart from working in Congress and working on issues where we’re trying to prosecute very specific things as lobbyists, the other thing is analysis, so we were analysing very closely. I had a wonderful team of four US-based people — not Australian diplomats, but several Americans, several Australians — all of whom had worked on the hill and we analysed the various congressional House and Senate races. We’re coming up to one now, which again is very prominent in US history. The pattern of this — the president’s second term will generally see either the House or Senate or both [flip], and in the case of Clinton, in the case of Bush, in the case of Obama, both flipped to the party which was not held by the president’s party.  Now, whether that will happen soon, I don’t know, but it’s bringing back a lot of memories of how we did that hugely detailed work on ‘where are the seats’, ‘what’s driving issues?’ Everything’s local, you’ve got to get out and about. We spread ourselves around the US. 

The Ambassador, Dennis Richardson, was fantastic. He just loved doing this, and I went with him a few times to see prominent people in other states that the Australian media or sometimes the American media didn’t focus on much. We learned a great deal, so we put together packages of information, much like you see on the Australian media now. By the way, the Australian media has become a lot better at analysing US politics since that time. Not because of us, but it’s noticeable to me. The detailed work that the Planet America team do —  we did that. We did all of that: we counted seats, we looked at the races, we looked at the media markets, we looked at the economic factors, and we looked at societal factors for 100 Senate seats and 435 House seats. 

The third part, as a result of that: who do we target as future leaders? So I was lucky in that time. In 2005, the Treasury asked me to do a paper on the front runners for the 2008 presidential election, three years ahead. It’s almost impossible to do. In fact, I would argue that you don’t bother about looking deeply at US races until several weeks before the actual vote, because polling is notoriously not that good, and people aren’t engaged in a place where there’s no mandatory voting. People have to become engaged to get themselves out to vote. You probably know these stories. They’re very common now in our media. The good analysis is based on these factors. So we would do that, and Dennis Richardson and I, and others in the embassy, would lead the embassy in a workshop.

First of all, I was with the ambassador, we were with two other very senior people, particularly on the Democratic side, because Bush was on his way out, and of course, possibly and probably a Democrat would come in, so we had this wonderful access to former Clinton officials. They come into the embassy for hours, and we’d go through a whiteboard exercise, ‘Who’s who in the zoo?’ on the Democratic side, and typically they were not people anyone knew. It’s always a new race. 

Secondly, we would target those people. So the Treasury official — I’d send him off to see a guy in Chicago who was a prominent economist but not well known to anyone else. We had good advice that he would be on a list for the Obama Treasury team.  So we would go to Chicago to see him. We went to Harvard to see a few people that we understood were going to be prominent. One was Samantha Power. One was Austan Goolsbee in Chicago. Very few of them are in either New York or California, and this is a mistake Australians often make. Those two biggest states are so prominent in the media and our economies and our relationships, but it’s extremely rare that a winning candidate or their team members are from those places. They’re often from Middle America: the big universities. There you’ve got Massachusetts, Chicago, the Midwest. They could come from anywhere.

So they’re roughly three things we did.

The other thing, the thing that people are aware of, is when we have high level visits. Visits take up a huge amount of our energy and time, and the thing about visits is you must preserve your best contacts — your highest level and most promising future presidents —only for the Prime Minister or the deputy, or some extremely senior person. Unfortunately, in a place like Washington, you get so many visiting Australians, and they all want to meet who’s who, and we just can’t do it half the time. So it’s a diplomatic process with our own countrymen helping them understand [this], and also finding other people they can talk to, because like ourselves, we’re constantly finding people who we believe have an inside view. Everyone claims they do. Do they really? I don’t know. But you get the zeitgeist when you’re there, and you do explore avenues. Some of them come to naught, and you’re lucky if one in ten is a very good contact with the right information or accurate information. It’s a huge circus, it’s exhausting, and there are hundreds and hundreds of people that we either meet and get to know, or we meet and we decide, ‘No, not going to get to know them’.  That job in particular was a very sharp example of the diplomatic life and the trajectory it can go through in a three-year or four-year posting, or even a two-year posting. Your contacts are all important. 

The first year, you might spend all your representation money taking people out to dinner. The second year you consolidate. You might focus on 50 people. It depends which country and how many people are influential. The third year, you really deepen those particular relationships, and quite often you know that person is going to come up to be a presidential candidate or a significant player in the House or the Senate. So we did all that, and our colleagues did that with the administration, all the other government departments as well. So they’re huge exercises. You wouldn’t believe our spreadsheets. 

I’d say that diplomacy, first and foremost, is about influence. It’s not about knowledge. Anyone can get knowledge, and you get knowledge at universities. There’s knowledge, there’s insight — insight is the judgment calls you make — and then there’s influence, which is what you do with it. A good diplomat will always be thinking about ‘how can I influence this situation, this person, this system’, and work that through. And it’s often never a single game, it’s to do with all of your team in the embassy working towards a series of common goals. I go back to the comment I made that not many theories influenced me. Some were hugely influential and extremely beneficial to us diplomats, but the most important thing for us is not those. It’s what we do on the ground.

PHOTO: Building relationships is the key to diplomacy according to Hardy, supplied by Jane Hardy

Jeremy: Having now gone through multiple transitions in your career, what is that adjustment process like for the embassies? How is the Australian embassy trying to approach different presidential administrations to ensure Australia’s interests are met?

This is the heart of diplomacy. I’ve mentioned Washington — of course, we have 160 other posts, so there will be 160 ways of doing this — but I would say first and foremost, we have to know ourselves, so we have to know our government’s priorities. And it’s a give and take because the embassies will be influential with the geographical desks in Canberra as to shaping the government’s view of something. Then the government — of course, Westminster system — they will tick on a ministerial or cabinet submission: yes, no, maybe. So that’s how the government system works. We have to know that in huge detail and be very sure of ourselves in pursuing government objectives. 

Then, when we go overseas, the most important element of that is you get a lot of leeway. You’re expected to know your stuff and do your thing. We don’t get instructions from Canberra every day, or even every week, or month. We might get occasional instructions, but it doesn’t work that way. The ambassador, in particular, will be a prominent person who is able to use their judgment, discretion and experience to pursue a particular thing or series of things. In Washington, a lot of that is preordained. Greg Moriarty is there now. I’ve known him well for many years, and he’s a tough guy. He will be doing his cost-benefit analysis. He has great cachet on AUKUS and security matters, of course, being former Secretary of Defense in Canberra. So he will have a lot of open doors for him to work. At other times, we don’t have those open doors. 

I’d say that diplomacy, first and foremost, is about influence. It’s not about knowledge. Anyone can get knowledge, and you get knowledge at universities. There’s knowledge, there’s insight — insight is the judgment calls you make — and then there’s influence, which is what you do with it. A good diplomat will always be thinking about ‘how can I influence this situation, this person, this system’, and work that through.

Even if there is an open door, it’s still difficult. Look at the constant chatter about AUKUS and the different elements. These are very big projects, and it’s not just about a couple of submarines, although that’s the bit that you hear about, because frankly, our media have certain things that they pursue because they’re more telegenic. What’s more telegenic than a submarine? Whereas the other stuff, it’s very hard to portray it on mass media and you wouldn’t want to always, because there’s always an element of ‘there must be privacy and secrecy in most negotiations until you’re close to the end’. So that’s the way it goes in Washington. 

In Spain, I was working on some very particular things. I went with three ideas, three big areas. One was our defense naval shipbuilding relationship. My predecessor had already presided over the period when the Australian government had commissioned two helicopter landing docks, otherwise known as aircraft carriers, which you’ll sometimes see in our media — big ships. There’s a whole lot that goes into that. These are 10 year programs, so I was there halfway through, and I saw the first one leave, and then I had to fly back to Port Melbourne with the Spanish Defense Minister, because that ship was fitted up by BAE Systems, and then was ready to be commissioned. The prime minister, Julia Gillard, was there. Then I went back to Spain. The second ship took the second year. The second ship was launched in Sydney at Garden Island again with the Spanish Defense Minister there. So, as ambassador, I’ll be with or in close proximity to any very senior government player. 

PHOTO: Hardy signing a mayor for the Mayor of Ferral in Galicia, Spain where Armada shipyards built two of the Australian Navy’s aircraft carriers, supplied by Jane Hardy

Now, the other things we did, though, were just delightful things that you can do with a partner country like Spain. Spain is a cultural superpower — deep roots to its culture, knowledge of its culture — and a friend had put me onto the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Guitar Festival, and the director there, Douglas Gautier: he had a great idea. He wanted to forge a link between the Cordoba Guitar Festival and the Adelaide Guitar Festival, and it worked out beautifully. And Slava Grigoryan was our ambassador in doing that. He came to Cordoba, which is in the Andalusian Highlands, the world’s epicenter of classical Spanish guitar. And you see this Australian superstar and his brother Lenny as well. They were both stars. It was wonderful, but it took about a year to set that up. And that’s still going, that link that a lot of people don’t really know about, unless they go to the Adelaide festivals all the time.

And then the third one was a new visa. We didn’t have the equivalent of a working holiday visa with Spain. We had it with most of the other Western European nations, a lot of the Asian nations, as you know, a long tradition in young Australians’ lives. The Spanish ambassador, and I, we’d each worked each end on how this would evolve, because visa negotiations are a bit like trade negotiations, very detailed: how many per year, what can they do, how many hours can they work. So it worked out really well, and I think they’re a lot more young Spaniards here as a result. Everything from young people coming as backpackers, beautiful festivals and cultural events, and Spanish warships. 

Another element I worked on there was the G20 because my first year in Spain, we were hosting the G20 and I put a lot of effort into that because Spain was an invited member of the G20 along with some other European nations. And that became very important because Spain was coming out of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and doing so, amazingly well. There was a lot in their experience that our G20 official, Heather Smith, and the Prime Minister wanted to know, so we all have our role to play, and the Spanish were very good to work with on that. Of course they wanted to be recognised as a G20 country, especially having come out of this economic disaster really. It was a disaster in many ways, They came out of it very quickly. During those couple of years. We had an average of one Spanish company setting up business in Australia per month. So over a two year period, there were 24–25 Spanish companies who set up business in Australia. And most of them are still here. They are big infrastructure companies. I have an apartment in Sydney, and we’ve just watched over the years these enormous tunneling projects. They’re mainly done by the Spanish, as part of a consortia, but the Spanish are very good at infrastructure. Even not long after the GFC, two of the world’s most prominent banks were Spanish, and I think it was four or six of the 10 top construction companies in the world were Spanish. So they had joined the EU many decades before, and they reaped enormous benefits and used the money very wisely to grow their domestic expertise very much in those areas. Shipbuilding was one thing, but domestic infrastructure was definitely another.

Rahul: I want to go back to what you talked about earlier, especially your time in Korea, and as you said, you’ve done major work in your career on arms control negotiations. Can you explain the nature of this work, and how does Australia approach an issue that is as complex and with many different factors, such as arms control?

Arms control is a fascinating area. It’s very much the purview of the multilateral system, so the big conferences are the UN-based conferences. There’s the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), that’s only just finished meeting in a big review conference in New York. There’s the Office of Chemical Weapons Prohibition. The big treaties have their headquarters. One is in the Netherlands, several are in Geneva, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is in Vienna and the others are spread around the world. 

We have a long history of involvement in promoting arms control. It partly comes about because after the Second World War, the Cold War was on, and the question of nuclear weapons came up all around our region for us as well. In the late 1960s the permanent five (P5) members of the UN — Russia, US, China, UK, and France — they possessed or were developing nuclear weapons, and they had reached a certain level. We, as a close ally, could have had nuclear weapons technology from the Brits very easily, and in fact, I believe we were contemplating that. Then in the 1970s, we had difficult relationships with Indonesia. We did not support their government at the time. We supported Malaysia’s Konfrontasi against the Indonesian government.

There were various things, but what transpired was brilliant. Both Indonesia and Australia said, ‘We will not acquire nuclear weapons, we will join the nuclear nonproliferation treaty’. Whether we had an effect on the region? I don’t know. But a lot of the ASEAN and members of the non-aligned movement in our region all joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — of course under huge influence from the two superpowers: Russia and the US.

PHOTO: Hardy with the US Coast Guard, including the current Commandant of the US Coast Guard, Kevin Lunday (left), supplied by Jane Hardy

Now, after that, there are many other kinds of control mechanisms. There are all the treaties on chemical weapons, biological weapons, radiological controls, controls on missiles and so on. We are members of all of those groups. They are non-treaty groups, very much. If you want to know what norm-building exercises are, you look at those. Norm building is what you do for many years, and you practice something together, which may eventually lead to a treaty or enhance an existing treaty. So, in the case of biological, chemical and radiological weapons and missiles, that was the case. Now we’re a uranium producer, and we were very driven by our desire to have our uranium tracked around the world, so those systems track where uranium material goes [and] how it’s processed.

The IAEA then goes in and looks at what’s happening, and occasionally gets kicked out of countries. Iran kicked them out a few years ago, North Korea kicked them out a decade ago, but nevertheless the taboo against the development and use of nuclear weapons has been very strong for 50 plus years due to all the efforts by particularly Russia and the United States. We now have a situation where the last control treaty, the arms limitation bilateral (New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) — the one that matters between the US and Russia — has expired. There’s no apparent effort to reignite it. So I believe we’re heading into another dangerous era of possible proliferation.

In addition to the P5, who have worked very closely together, the UK and France are also just brilliant at committing to controls and helping countries reap the benefits of nuclear technology without going toward nuclear weapons. That’s what the promise of the NPT is. Now we have what we call the Nuclear Nine (N9). So in addition to the five, you’ve got four: Israel undeclared, North Korea declared, India and Pakistan. 

India and Pakistan have had a particular dynamic, the controls there are interesting to watch but still very concerning. The controls really are around signaling and understanding the signals of the military relationships. India has long claimed that Pakistan has threatened tactical use of nuclear weapons: that’s small weapons on the battlefield, which aren’t controlled by a central system. They’re controlled by an army general. So that’s one area. 

North Korea. A terrible proliferation story. When we went up there in the early 2000s, they hadn’t declared their nuclear program, but though there were deep suspicions then, in the end of 2002 it was revealed by intelligence and the IAEA that they had reprocessed plutonium in breach of their obligations under the NPT. So we held back.

I went back one more time after that declaration. It was a very difficult visit. I went with Murray McLean, who was our senior person in Canberra, and various other officials. We always had someone from Seoul, someone from Beijing, and someone from Canberra. And at that time I was in Canberra, so we went up there.

We talked long and hard. We tried to offer inducements, we tried to warn them about the pariah status that would ensue, and that they would not have benefits that they had previously had. But soon after that, they actually declared, tested and developed. Now they have enough material and delivery systems for 60 warheads plus.

The problem with a country like North Korea is they’ve always had a high level of scientific knowledge, and they had nuclear technology from the Soviet era. If you look at the Soviet era, Ukraine had nukes on its soil during its occupation by the Soviets and various other European countries, and they were all corralled and moved. The same with the US, they had 100 warheads in South Korea. They were moved. So that has been global history: very positive.

As much as you want to blame Russia and the US for the arms race, they’ve actually played a very important role in signaling control, transparency and limitations on developing these weapons and drawdowns. So you’ve got Israel, possibly 90 [warheads]. North Korea: 60 warheads. India and Pakistan, several hundred each. That is a dangerous situation, because none of them are controlled in the way that the US and Russia control their arsenals. So we’ve got to keep working on that. I’m actually going to give a presentation of that to the Australian Institute of International Affairs on the 16th of June. 

I really think the way forward is for China to play a key role, become more transparent in its own nuclear game and to start to work with the US on future control mechanisms, because both China and the US are leaders in AI. This will be the big new change. Russia is not [an AI leader] so the old Russia-US treaties probably don’t so much apply anymore because they’re defunct. But a new regime has to grow up, and China with the US can do so; only those two countries, I believe. 

The other thing I’d mention is the Australia Group. We invented the Australia Group. It’s the control of chemical and biological weapons. It’s a like-minded group, so there are 32 members, from South America, North America, Europe, no one in Africa at this stage and Korea and Japan in our region. We set it up because we noticed that the dual-use items that form the basis of many chemical and biological weapons — which used to be called the poor man’s nuclear weapons, especially through the age of terrorism — there were too many difficulties that certain items were being bought up in large scale and beyond what a country would need. A lot of these items are fairly easily procured, but they are now controlled items. The 32 members of the Australia Group work with each other on declaring who’s bought what from them. The Europeans are very advanced in their biological and scientific world and their chemical world, so Europe has long been a market where nefarious actors have sourced things. But our controls have worked so far, so good.

We’ve had Saddam Hussein’s chemical attack on the Kurds. We’ve had various other attacks [like] the Russians using fentanyl in Chechnya. So you can’t ever say 100% but we are working [on it]. That’s work that most people have no idea goes on. It’s a small group within DFAT who lead that with expert input from the Department of Defense and other departments.

Rahul: As someone who has had a very long and distinguished career in the foreign service, what advice would you have to current students looking to pursue a career in foreign affairs and diplomacy?

I would say a couple of things.

One is keep a very open mind about a role. But ultimately, if you want a formal career the way I have had, you must think about applying to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra, and you must be prepared to spend some of your life in Canberra. I must say, we’ve come and gone from Canberra between our postings, and always loved it.

Secondly, you are up against a big group who are applying. I know various people, some of whom have reached right at the top, and they didn’t get in the first time they applied. You look at the DFAT website and all the ads come up, and each year there will be one or two rounds of graduate applications. I did that, even though I’d been working for Oxfam and had a family and everything, I applied under the graduate program. 

You can also apply under specialist rounds. You’ll come in at a slightly higher level, not much higher, and they’re the economic, legal, and development rounds. So economic [is] self-explanatory. You’ll probably be doing very difficult work on FTAs, technical and other work — also very rewarding. Legal. There’s a legal division, a lot of work done on some of the big treaties. They cover the Antarctic Treaty for Australia. Thirdly, there’s the development stream, and that is people who become very good at managing project processes. Development is a great area to work on. In Canberra, that’s very much managing contracts; knowing the law around the contracts, knowing all the requirements, detailed work on contracts.

A friend joined the legal area. She was ahead of me, but I got my promotions. You [oscillate] like this over the years, so it doesn’t matter. 

I’d say I had a very important opportunity joining the graduate trainee program, because it opened my eyes to a lot of things that I could do within the whole portfolio, and it was very good training — two solid years of training before you even go out on your first assignment or long term diplomatic posting. I’m so glad I did that.

In terms of degrees, I’ve got several myself. I reckon it’s really important to have done one of the basic degrees. I would posit history, [which] is always incredibly important, economics and law. These three areas, and if you like, political science or International Relations. International Relations is a discipline that grew out of all of the others, but I still think it’s incredibly important to have one of the basic degrees in the social sciences and even the humanities. It will help you so much. 

Your first few years will be spent relearning everything you know about writing; there are different formats, different ways of writing, a different language, different needs. You will learn to crunch information right down. A ministerial submission is two pages, and the first page is a series of boxes — yes, no, maybe — and the second page has to give the argument as to why you’ve recommended these things to the minister. Very, very precise. Very crunched down. 

Then when you go on a posting, the really thrilling thing I loved was to write the diplomatic cables, whatever subject it was on. These are not reporting cables. They serve a reporting function, but they are analytical cables, which provide the answer to ‘What does this mean for Australia?’.

Every single cable must answer that question: ‘Why is this important to us?’. And then in that answer you must say, ‘because this person might become the next president, or because that chapter in the FTA goes against our interests and we must modify’. So these diplomatic cables are just so thrilling to write. We would get at times in Malaysia, we were writing at least one a day each, and the cables are no more than two or three pages as well. So you can see the style of writing, the way you use your knowledge is very different to parts of academia, or perhaps not all — you may have examples that are quite similar. 

So, you need those basic degrees and a very good proficiency in writing to thrive as a young diplomat.